Don't Count Your Chickens...

...until they hatch, right?

Well, this "chicken" hasn't quite hatched, but it's peeping in the shell :0)

Last year I was thinking about a book I'd read, 10 P's in a Pod, about the Arnold Pent family.  If I remember right,  the family remembers each read the Bible individually for an hour before breakfast, and then they read aloud as a family for a half hour after breakfast, lunch, and dinner. 

Do the math.  That's 2 1/2 hours of Bible reading.  Every day.  They were saturated in God's Word.

As a result, they could quote not just verses, but chapters, even entire books of the Bible.  They would go to churches and challenge people to begin any verse in the Bible, and one of the Pents would be able to finish it.

I was challenged and convicted.  Not to try to impress people by finishing their verses, but to move my family toward spending more time in God's Word. 

I didn't think that jumping in with the Pent's reading schedule would go over too well, but I thought of a more 'doable' goal:

This plan breaks the Bible into smaller chunks.  Each day has an OT reading, a NT reading, a Psalm, and 2 or 3 Proverbs.  In one calendar year, you'll read through the entire Bible, doing the Psalms and Proverbs twice.

And we're almost there.  

We've broken it up by mealtime, doing the OT at breakfast, the NT at lunch, and the Psalm and Proverb at dinner.  The breakfast reading is the longest, maybe 10 - 15 minutes at the most.  But we're managing.  We're going to make it.

Sure, sometimes we've gotten behind.  We went on vacation.  Tate was in the hospital for nine days.  We just forgot.  And I told myself that it's okay if we don't finish exactly in one calendar year, because what really matters is the goal - spending more time in God's Word.  But we've caught up.  Sometimes we did our mealtime readings, and then read an extra day's worth before bed.  (Because I really would like to finish by New Year's!  But if we don't, we'll finish in January.)

Anyway... I post this in part to keep myself accountable to keep going and finish amidst all our Christmas activities, in part to cheer for the boys for being (mostly) willing participants and readers, and also to throw it out there, for anyone else who might be looking for this kind of challenge.

You can do it.