I'm not sure if I mentioned it here on my blog or not but one of my goals going into this year was to study the Word of God. Not only with the quick daily devotion where I devote a whole 2 minutes to God out of my entire day, but truly STUDYING. I decided to start with Genesis and just work my way through the Bible, chapter by chapter, dissecting as I go and seeing what God had for me to learn. I am not following any sort of "Read your Bible in a Year Plan" or anything because I do not want to feel rushed or that I absolutely had to get "this much" done. No time limits, no skim reading to finish, just God teaching me. So with the excitement that comes with all new goals, I promptly got started on researching different methods of study, bible marking, etc and came up with a system that works for me. I created my own color-coded Bible marking key (to pacify my OCD before making random marks every where and "ruining" my bible in my mind), pulled out my awesome NLT Parallel Study Bible and trusty KJV, and made the goal to do my study at least 3-4 days a week (on top of an actual daily devotion). In addition to the reading and marking, I decided to take notes on each chapter I read, as any good student would do. Because I learn visually and by writing things down, my note taking has morphed into a Bible art journal. I write, I doodle, I color. I am not an artist by any means but I love it!
The whole process usually ends up taking a couple hours at least, and with that being said, I have not been as faithful to it as I wanted when I excitedly set my goal. In all honesty, I just picked it up a couple days ago for the first time in probably a month. I'm only on Genesis 13 and we are 3 months into the year, to give you an even further idea of how much of a slacker I am. I found myself thinking "If I could find a way to cut down the time, then maybe I could be more consistent". But the more I thought about my "process", (For those of you wondering...I read the chapter in my NLT and then my KJV. I use my coding key to mark my KJV. Then I read the study notes in both bibles for that chapter. Lastly, I do my journaling for my study.) the more I realized there's not one part of that I want to cut out because it all fits into the way I learn and retain. Then another thought slapped me across the face- How SELFISH am I? I easily spend 2 hours reading, watching TV, etc almost every day. But my first thoughts when it came to God's time were "How can I make this take less time?".
As I did a friend's hair this week, I was listening as she talked about dealing with the transition of being a parent to young children to being a parent of adults who no longer need you to "mother" them. She explained how frustrating it can be to only be in the loop of things when your child needs something or even just calling to vent their frustrations and hard times. Not frustrating because she doesn't want to be there for them in that way,(Let's be honest, we all just wanna call Mom when we have a rough day) but because her desire is to be included in all the happy, every day occurrences too. She went on to say how she wanted their time. Not because they stood to gain anything from it or because it felt like an obligation, but simply because they wanted to enjoy time with her. As I thought about the conversation later, I thought about how great a comparison that was to our relationship with our ultimate parent, God.
God just wants a little of our time. Not only when we are going through a hard time and need his help, not only when we need a favor, not only what we have left over at the end of the day week month- in my case. He wants us to talk to him about the good things. He wants us to spend time with Him, not out of obligation or fulfilling some "Christian duty", but because we WANT to.
Too many people think "God has the entire population to worry about...He doesn't care about my little day to day things". Wrong. The Bible calls him our Father for a reason. He does care. So instead of thinking of ways to cut down my study time, of getting it "out of the way", I need to enjoy that time with my parent because I love him. Because He loves me more than I could ever fathom. And because I am honored and humbled that He cares a whole lot about spending time with me.
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