Was my relationship with God what it should have been this past year?
There is definite room for improvement but there were things that I did that were good for my relationship with God.
Daily Bible Reading
I was pretty faithful to my daily devotions. I set my homepage to the chronological reading plan at BibleGateWay.com and I committed to doing the daily Bible reading before doing anything else on the computer. I was faithful to that but was unfaithful when I had computer problems. I probably missed less than 20 or so readings the entire year.
For a few years now I have made it a goal to read through the Bible in a year. I've used a number of different methods to help me do this and I've done fairly well.
Recently I've come across even more online Bible reading helps:
ESV Bible Reading Plans
For the Love of God
One Year Bible Blog
Bible Read Through
Blogging Thru the Bible in 90 Days
This year I've started doing the default Bible Reading plan through Bible Read Through but I don't feel totally settled into it yet and may change to one of the others. The Bible in 90 Days challenge is tempting but I don't want to take on more than I can handle. In reality, though, it shouldn't be any big deal to spend an hour a day reading my Bible. Thing is, I'd like more time to actually study the Bible too, so we'll have to see. I've still made a commitment to do nothing on the computer until my Bible reading is done. It is priority number one.
I believe that daily Bible reading is vital if you want to grow in God. I've been encouraging my kids in that for years. You don't have to read the Bible through in a year. Start small and work up. One thing I did for my kids was I made them a Bible Reading Chart to tuck into their Bibles. On it was listed all the chapters of the Bible and I suggested that they mark of each chapter as they read it and work their way through the Bible no matter how long it took them to do so. It seems daunting at the beginning but slow and steady gets you through and it feels good to have tangible evidence of what you have read.
I'd like to encourage all readers, Don't Forget The Most Important Book.
Bible Memorization
I wanted to work on Bible memorization and had great plans, but I didn't follow through on them. I need to do better this year. I found the Scripture Memory System a couple of years ago and have made an attempt at using it but haven't been faithful. I really want to give it another try. I'd love to find an online tool to use but haven't found one that fits me yet.
Prayer
While there have been many times in the past year that I had great prayer times, brought on by tough circumstances, I could have, and should have, been much more consistent in my prayer life. I do fine with praying about things throughout the day but I don't do well with focused intentional prayer time. I need to work on that.
Yesterday I decided to start a prayer journal document to help me be more focused and intentional with my praying. I've started prayer journals before but they've died out quickly. I'm thinking doing it on the computer may help me be more consistent, but we'll see. Basically all I'm doing so far is taking time when it strikes me to write whatever I happen to be praying for at the time.
One thing that I did work on more last year was praying scripture. I really found that to be helpful and powerful. I am hoping to do more of that in my prayer journal this year and I may share more here.
So, that's my ponderings on question #1. My relationship with God wasn't too bad this past year. I made some conscious efforts to improve it, and it definitely helped, but there is also definite more for improvement, and I will be working on improving it this year.
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