If you are like me, you may have grown up with the daily Bible readings, and feel like you know all the Bible stories and what the books are about fairly well from repeated readings year to year. However, I sometimes feel like my understanding of the flow of the Bible is fairly disjointed since often a few chapters in a book would be missed on Bible class nights, or for other reasons, and the story would be disrupted.
I have thought of reading the Bible through chronologically, but there is something helpful about reading from three different places in the Bible in one night. It can sometimes be amazing how many connections you can find between the three readings, and it is a nice to mix the Old and New Testament together.
So here is an alternative… bring your focus to one of the books being read, while still continuing with the regular readings.
This journal for Lamentations uses an “inductive study” approach – observation, interpretation, and application. It can be helpful to mark up the text with colours and underlining, but you may not want to do this in your regular Bible. If that’s the case, then print out a copy of the text and mark that up. You can do this pretty easily from the various online Bible programs available. And if you have children, have them join in the detective work – you may find that they enjoy finding the different parts and colouring them in, thinking of questions to ask, or making lists of what they have found.
You may think Lamentations is an awkward and depressing book to start with… but I think you may find encouragement in it instead. Give it a try and let us know what you think!
– Julie S.