This title has twofold significance to Lizzy and I right now and neither is anything to shrug at for us.
We're beginning what might be one of the most significant journeys in our life and we're not even putting gas in the Liberty to do so.
The words of this title are the first words of the Bible. That's significance number one.
Significance number two is the fact that starting a couple of days ago Lizzy and I began a Bible study that takes us through the entire Bible as it happened chronologically. We're not doing a cover-to-cover reading of the Bible like both of us have tried numerous times in the past. This time we're trying to read it and experience it in the order that things happened. For example, instead of reading a crap load of history and then reading about a prophet who lived sometime during that crap load of history, we're going to read the history, pause to read the prophet's work when he comes up in history, and then resume the history until we get the opportunity to do the same thing again.
There have been a few things in our life lately that have funneled us into this situation. One of them was when we were studying with people our age through the book of Galatians and we had to keep flipping back and forth between Galatians and Acts to see the historical context of Paul's writings. We thought, how cool would it be to read all this stuff as it happened.
Another instance that led us to this journey was a conversation we had with a good friend of ours over lunch one day. He wasn't raised in the church and didn't have the stock Bible background that most of us former church-kids have. He read the Bible for himself and came to know and love Jesus through scriptures. It was a humbling conversation to have, but very encouraging at the same time.
Lizzy and I have never read the whole Bible. This is a problem. We say we base our entire lives around the truth in this book, yet we've not given of ourselves enough to read every word of it? It just seems so backwards to not expose ourselves to the entirety of God's word when we have easy access to it whenever we want.
So, on the 14th of July we began a journey that is supposed to take a year, but who knows how long it will really take? Maybe less than a year, maybe more.
We're both taking notes in steno books (my favorite note receptacle), but we're not putting any rules on the note-taking, other than that we both need to take notes because we'll learn more that way. My goal is to post my scanned notes on this blog to share them with anyone who'll read them (and who can read them) and to more or less hold myself accountable to see this through to the finish line.
We're excited to see what God does in us through this study.
Round 1
