The Plan

The Plan.  My husband always tells me “you gotta have a plan”.  He is a scientist by nature and profession.  With my limited knowledge of science experiments and all how that works, I do know they have plans and procedures that brings them results.  Results matter. 

I am the complete opposite of science guy.  I am one of those artist types.  Never goes the same way twice when traveling, likes to move around the furniture according to my mood, lives each day as it comes, hates the idea of sameness and bland.  Drives science guy crazy. 

Yet we tend to balance each other out.  He knows that he could use a little more spontaneity and flexibility and, dare I say, I could do with a little structure. 

The last post I wrote, I talked about how I prayed for God to wreck my life and He answered.  Sometimes I wish He would just ignore me when I blurt out enthusiastic prayer requests after reading or hearing someone else’s testimony. I don’t think science guy has these problems.  He would probably think it through.  Ponder the possible outcomes of that experiment (eh prayer) and make a logical conclusion.  Not me.  I am like that.  As I already mentioned, the spontaneity thing.  Back to my point. 

I realized that if God could wreck my life so easily than I must have been putting all my identity and security in what could be wrecked.  Only in Christ is my life wreck-less.  I concluded that if I am going to live a life reckless for the Lord than I am going to have to learn how to put all my identity and security in Him.  If He is all I need and I already have all I need in Him (2 Peter 1:3), than that sets me free to love recklessly, give recklessly, serve recklessly and follow Him recklessly.  I will no longer be compelled to worry about all those things that I thought I needed to identify me and bring me security.  You might want to read that post before you go any further. 

Here is the plan.  I know of no other way to profoundly change the way I think than to memorize and meditate on scripture.  If I really want to get this “complete” in Christ thing, I am going to need to focus my mind.  My sense of spontaneity and free wheeling nature is going to have to set itself down for a bit and be replaced by structure and a plan.  A memorization plan, a plan of great breadth and magnitude, a plan that I am certain when accomplished will produce results. 

I am going to memorize the whole book of Colossians and blog about it for one entire year.  Yes the whole glorious thing.  The anxiety level and doubt are even now crowding in as I write this.  I am definitely not sure if I will be able to really accomplish this or not but I have done this kind of thing before.  I memorized a couple of Paul’s letters and several of the Psalms but with each undertaking I always wonder “can I actually do it?”  Never really know for sure.  I have started and stopped other attempts lots of times; way more then I have actually successfully finished. 

In order to keep myself accountable, I have decided to blog about it.  I will share my struggles, any tips I learn along the way and of course what God is teaching me.  I can say, without any hesitation, that the most profound things I have learned and retained from scripture have come from memorization and meditation.  The kind of things that really stick with you.  I will be using several commentaries (I will post those on another day) and the New International Version (1984 NIV) for memorization, plus any other resources, quotes etc that I come across. 

A word about what version I have chosen to memorize.  While I would love to tackle the memorization from a more literal translation like the ESV (English Standard Version) or NKJV (New King James Version), I find the NIV’s language structure more conducive personally for memorization.  Since the point of the project is to actually memorize this book, I can use all the help I can get.  In addition, almost all the commentaries I am using, that will aid in the meditation portion of this plan, teach from the NIV.  By the way, they are best rated commentaries (as you will see in a later post) and not an inferior resource in case you were wondering.  So let’s put our academic snobbery away for a bit and give the girl a break.  Did I mention that I am one of those academic snobbery types?  If you have any idea how much time I spent in arriving at this decision, you would be stunned.  I think less time was spent on whether to put a man on the moon.  So the NIV it is.  You might need to encourage me from time to time that it is ok to be memorizing a “lesser” version of the Bible.  Just kidding.  Sort of.  

So here is what I am thinking.  Perhaps you might like to join me.  The goal is 96 verses in one year or 1.84615385 verses per week.  Doesn’t seem too hard (that’s me convincing myself).  Or maybe, you can take a verse here or there.  Or if you prefer, you can just follow along and learn as I learn.  Whatever, you decide, it’s all good.  Tomorrow I am going to talk about particulars of memorization and one of the two biggest obstacles that we have to overcome if we want to be successful at this. 

So here we go.  This will be a journey.  There will be challenges and setbacks and at some points hesitations.  I will be traveling at a disjointed pace since my intention is to not just memorize for the sake of memorization but to be changed by the substance of the scriptures.  That is why I am doing this.  I want to be different.  I want real change.  I want to be wreck-less so I can live reckless for Him. 

Over the next two posts I will talk about our two biggest obstacles or problems that we face when memorizing scripture.  There are two mindsets that inhibit our memorizing momentum.   They can be nailed within the framework of these two questions:

         1) Does scripture memorization really matter?

         2) Is scripture memorization even possible?

See you then.