Yes, We're Still Here

The one picture we have of the two of us from our Atlanta trip last year.

This update is for our few subscribers. Anh and I haven't posted here in a long time, but we've continued our friendship and our many Bible discussions via Slack. And we've now read through the Bible twice together! In 2020-2021, we used The Bible Recap. In 2021-2022, we used a 5-day plan, which I found on Tim Challies's blog. We finished this latest plan in August.

Backing up ... in 2020-2021, not long after I surrendered my life to Jesus, I read the Bible on my own using the M'Cheyne schedule. When I did that, I took copious notes and spent an hour or so in Bible study each morning. With the Bible Recap, I still took lots of notes, and I also listened to the podcast, which amounted about 45 minutes to an hour of Bible study each day. This past year, with the five-day plan, I wasn't able to put as much time in, and I also wanted to just read the Bible as a story, without looking up every interesting word or consulting commentaries for every question that popped into my head. So I simply read; my one "extra" was that I highlighted all the names of God (yellow), Jesus (purple), and Holy Spirit (green).

I'm glad I took this most recent approach. Each time I read through, everything is cemented just a little more in my memory, in my knowledge, in my imagination, and it helped to get a more straightforward sense of the bigger picture, without all the forays into the various details. But now that I've read it without the burden of research and inquiry, I'm ready to dive back in to true Bible study, and so is Anh.

So, for 2022-2023, we are using Stephen Witmer's two-year plan. This plan schedules shorter passages for each day, which will provide more time for research and note-taking. It also works in a day or two every few weeks for catch-up. Finally, we will read through the whole Bible once and the Psalms and Proverbs four times. (I'm already tempted to substitute one of those Psalms/Proverbs cycles with the New Testament, or at least the Gospels ... but time will tell.)

Anyway, it's a commitment to plan for two years, but I'm looking forward to it. We actually started on October 1, so we're almost a week in. We've had some good discussions in Slack, but those discussions disappear forever after 90 days. For that reason, I'm planning to drop some of those discussions (or at least my thoughts, paired with her thoughts, hopefully in essay form) here. I won't be posting often, but I'm hoping to post once or twice a month.

Thanks for following along!