Filed under: Word
On the first day of the year we started working on memorizing Paul’s letter to the Philippians. Today begins week seven of a plan that divides the book up over sixteen weeks, with the hopes of memorizing it all by Easter Sunday. Thus far it’s been quite an encouraging and fruitful experience. We made these little notebooks with the memory verses on the lefthand side of the notebook and blank pages on the right hand side to write down our reflections or questions on the passages we were working on that week. It’s neat how it all came about.
Around Christmas I was spending some time coasting through the blogosphere, reading some articles and blogs and then following interesting links to new blogs which led to new blogs, etc. I usually don’t do this because of the amount of time that can be spent. My preference is to use an RSS reader to follow the blogs that I’ve decided to read, and to only open the RSS reader on Saturday. That helps me to not bounce from site to site, and when I limit it to one day per week I’ve found that I’m much more selective about the ones I take the time to read. If I opened it up daily, there wouldn’t be too many new posts and I’d be more likely to read them all. By letting them stack up for a week each time, the list is much longer and I’m better at skipping over those that I’m not actually all that interested in. Anyways, that’s not the point of this. I ended up on a post that someone wrote a couple years ago, about this method (with the notebooks) that someone had used to memorize Ephesians. They had the templates to be printed out and taped into the notebook already and it seemed like a great thing. I was thinking about going for it and trying to memorize Ephesians this way.
Before I did, though, I started thinking about Philippians. This book has been one that I’ve spent a lot of time in since last October and had already been benefiting from and resonating with. Why not use this method but switch to Philippians? Of course, I would have to through and divide up the passages and format them to print them at the right size, but that would be alright. Then, the next time I opened up my blog reader there was a post inviting people to memorize Philippians this year, using this same method. It turned out to be from the guy whose blog I had landed on after following a long string of links just days before. He was the one who had memorized Ephesians and blogged about it back in 2008. He had recently decided to do this again with Philippians and was encouraging others to join him, and one of the blogs I subscribe to had posted his invitation. It was just perfect. So, all that to say, he did the work of dividing it into sixteen chunks and formatting it to fit in the notebooks that we’ve been carrying around and referring to countless times a day for the past six weeks. We’re both memorizing it together and there are hundreds or thousands of others around the world who are doing it too.
