A bit of a milestone–I fin­ished the One Year Bible read­ing plan last night! I man­aged to stretch it out to 27 months but that’s alright. I started in Jan­u­ary 2009 and ini­tially kept the daily read­ings going till May of that year, when I feel hope­lessly behind. I kept a men­tal note of the date and in May 2010 I started where I had left off. I kept read­ing reg­u­larly until the last week in Decem­ber, when I was under­stand­ably dis­tracted by the birth of our third son Gre­gory on 12/28. Knowing I wanted to keep the cycle going, I skipped that week and started again on Jan­u­ary 1, 2011. It was only last night that I went back and fin­ished up that last week–featuring Malachi and Rev­e­la­tions (which has the Lamb’s War metaphor so impor­tant to early Friends).

Thanks go to Gregg Kosela and AJ Schwanz for let­ting me know such a thing as one year Bible read­ing plans existed. I had never been able to stick to a reg­u­lar Bible-reading reg­i­men before. The grand­mother who fre­quently declared me a Bible illit­er­ate would be so proud! (Actu­ally not, she’d find some­thing else to cri­tique, but her hangups around fam­ily and “Chris­t­ian” liv­ing are a much longer blog post!).

It’s been great hav­ing a reg­u­lar spir­i­tual prac­tice. I’m glad I can find my way around the Bible now and my under­stand­ing of Friends has deep­ened. The early Quaker writ­ings are steeped in Bib­li­cal allu­sions and we miss a lot when we miss those references.