Therefore if any be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold,
all things are become new. ~ II Cor. 5: 17
I'm sure I'm not the only one who has taken time to reevaluate things in my life and resolve to do things better. Seems we all do this at the beginning of the year but how many of us actually follow through the entire year? I know I don't. This year I was overwhelmed as I stopped to think about what changes I wanted to make, what things I wanted to work on. Part of that is I'm very hard on myself but the other part of that is my 5 little blessings...
They keep me pretty busy so a lot of the things I would love to resolve to do I just don't have time for. Also, having the privilege of raising these 5 children God has given me comes with a lot of responsibility. God has entrusted them with us to raise for Him...a wonderful but also hard job. There are so many things I would love to be doing differently or better or more consistently with them. Then I also have myself to work on! There are many areas in my own life I would like to be consistent about or change. So after much prayer and evaluating my priorities I finally decided what my resolution would be: Read my Bible in a year. It's something I've desired to do in past years but it just never seemed like the right time. This year it felt right. Knowing my personality I knew doing it chronologically would not be the way for me to go. So I went online and found a schedule that would work for me Here. I've never read the Bible through in a year and I'm really excited to do it. I also concluded that if I can be consistent about this then all the other areas that I'm hoping to work on/change will fall into place as I spend more time in my Bible. God just showed me that I need to be realistic about my goals and understand that this is a season in my life that I'm just not going to be able to do certain things I'd like to right now...and that's ok with me.
Part of choosing to discipline myself in the area of Bible reading and seeing that for the past 5 days I've been doing it has me encouraged to try and discipline myself in other areas. I'm for the most part a very organized person but always feel like things could be MORE organized and MORE efficient. So I've been on a frenzy lately re-arranging things. Many times I have people ask me how I do this or how I make time for that so I thought I'd share some of my tips/techniques that I've adapted over the next few blogs that help keep our home running, kids clean and mom sane!
I trust everyone had a great holiday season! I feel like so much has gone on in our family in the past few weeks...just such a busy time of year for everyone. We had a great celebration...very quiet but great. I'm not big on talking about or focusing on gifts we got because it's not why we celebrate but one thing I got this year was just so fun and cool...an ornament with all our family members names. A wonderful reminder of how much God has blessed Ben and I over the years...8 to be exact as of yesterday! What an amazing journey it's been!
I have started and not finished so many times with reading through the Bible in a year. I think for me I might try just reading the entire Bible regardless of how long it takes . . . I'm going to check out that link b/c for me, a Genesis-Revelation reading always got bogged down in Leviticus whereas reading them in a historical/chronological order would put things in order of how they happened . . . anyway, I'm curious about the schedule your link has.
ReplyDeleteI've done it twice. I loved it and plan to do it again this year. I finished a bit early this year, so I decided to read the book of Acts again till the first of the year. I'll be starting in Genesis within the next few days.
ReplyDeleteBut I think Sarah is right. Reading it through regardless of how long it takes is a great goal, especially with kids! :)
Sarah...I too can't seem to get passed Leviticus!! :) What I like about the schedule I choose is that you don't spend weeks or months in the same book...moving around is a good fit for my personality. I agree with Jan though...it doesn't matter how long it takes it only matters that you are doing it!! :)
ReplyDeleteMelissa, Thank you so much for this post. It is a blessing knowing we aren't alone in our daily lives. I too have resolved to read my Bible through this year...again and I really hope to finish. Can't finish if you don't start, right. You just seem to know the right words to put on this blog and I know God will bless you by it! Thanks for being an encouragement and a good friend!
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