Making time for scripture study and journaling. #8

Time is usually the biggest factor that keeps us from studying the scriptures. There are a million things that occupy our time. Work, our children, school, church callings, house work, doctor appointments, grocery shopping, sleeping and the list goes on and on.

But here’s the thing that hit me. What’s more important then progressing in the gospel? NOTHING! Now I’m not saying that the long list of things we need to accomplish every day aren’t important, because they're very important and must be done. But the point is that everything will get done, you just need to put the importance of gospel knowledge at the top of your to do list.

There’s always time, but you need to make the decision to find it. I’ll give you an example, my work day starts at 9am. But I show up to work at 7:30am to get ready for the day and also read my scriptures and journal. That's a good solid hour; do you know what you can achieve in just one hour a day? How about reading the Book of Mormon in just over a month, and that’s just reading one hour a day. But here’s the thing, it’s all up to you and you need to make it a habit. Now don’t get me wrong, I know that there are some days that are just harder than others. But I’m fully ready to give up at lest a half hour of sleep if I need to. One of the big things that motivates me to not miss a day is keeping a Daily church Journal. I like knowing that I haven’t missed a day of studying my scriptures and keeping a journal since I started almost a year ago.

I just hope in some small way the habits and techniques that have helped me achieve some success in gaining further light and knowledge pertaining to the Gospel of Jesus Christ will help you.

John 5:39

39 ¶ Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me.

Journal, Journal, Journal. #7

I can't begin to tell you how important journaling is to remembering what you’ve just learned  from your scripture study. Remember in grade school when your teacher would tell you to say your spelling words out loud while you were writing them. That was to help you remember them. It’s kind of the same thing. Journaling is like telling someone about what you’ve just learned.

But journaling goes so far beyond that.

Reasons for journaling:

1.To keep our thoughts straight.
2.It keeps us on track and motivated.
3.It help us remembering details.
4.Expressing our thoughts and feelings
5.It’s a history of something we were passionate enough to write it in our journal.

There are so many things you can journal about.

1.Personal journal
2.Church journal
3.Study journal
4.Conference journal
5.Blessings journal
6.A journal about your children’s youth
7.A journal about a particular event

If it means something to you, you can journal about it.
You can keep your journal on a computer or on paper, what’s ever is more comfortable for you. A lot of people like writing in paper journals because it allows them to add pictures and such. I prefer to keep my journal on my tablet using Microsoft Word. That way I can use a template and set it up for the whole year. Here’s an example of my church and scripture study journal.

Monday, December 25, 2017

My thoughts:

Question of the day:

How did I make a difference?

Scripture reading:

Favorite scripture of the day:

Tuesday, December 26, 2017

My thoughts:

Question of the day:

How did I make a difference?

Scripture reading:

Favorite scripture of the day:

Wednesday, December 27, 2017

My thoughts:

Question of the day: 

How did I make a difference?

Scripture reading:

Favorite scripture of the day:

Thursday, December 28, 2017

My thoughts:

Question of the day:

How did I make a difference?

Scripture reading:

Favorite scripture of the day:

Friday, December 29, 2017

My thoughts:

Question of the day:

How did I make a difference?

Scripture reading:

Favorite scripture of the day:

Saturday, December 30, 2017

My thoughts:

Question of the day:

How did I make a difference?

Scripture reading:

Favorite scripture of the day:

Sunday, December 31, 2017

My thoughts:

Sacrament Meeting
Ward News:
Presiding:
Conducting:
Speakers:
Hymns:

Sunday school lesson # Notes

Question of the day:

How did I make a difference?

Scripture reading:

Favorite scripture of the day:

My last blog post in this series will end with making the time to study the scriptures and journaling.

Now that we're reading what do we do? #6

Now that we have the reading/studying down, what else can we do with all this new Gospel knowledge? We just can’t walk away from our notes, that’s where all the knowledge is still sitting. We read it but did we learn it? I know that as for myself  10 minutes after I’ve read it I’m starting to forget it. So I started to think, how can I remember what I’m reading?

What I started to do was journal. If I was reading I was taking notes and journaling. So it became a three part process. Read, highlight notes and write it in my church journal. So at this point I’m seeing that new found knowledge 3 times. It’s called repetition. Once I started to journal I found that life became more organized and less stressful. It’s not as hard as you may think, once you've done it for a few days you’ll get much faster. On an average day I can study 5 chapters of scripture plus take notes and journal in about 1 to 1.5 hours, depending on the length of the 5 chapters. There are chapters that take 2 minutes then there are chapters that take 22 minutes. But from what I have found the average time of a chapter is 5 to 7 minutes. When you use the audio player that is provided with Gospel Library, each chapter has a time stamp that tells you how long that audio track will take. So before you start reading/studying you can look at the time stamps and figure out these 5 chapters will take me 37 minutes to read and with my note taking and journaling I should be done in about an hour.

Now you're on a roll. You're reading, you're studying and now you're progressing in the Gospel.

My next blog post I'll talk a little more about journaling and how that can help with your gospel studies and what you're learning in church classes, ward, stake and general conference.

Staying focused while reading the scriptures. #5

For as long as I can remember I had difficulty staying focused while reading. The smallest thing would distract me and take my mind elsewhere. But about 6 or 7 months ago I decided that I would listen to the scriptures. I’ve always felt that listen to the scriptures wasn't really studying the scriptures, I felt like I was cheating. Out of convenience I normally read the scriptures on my tablet using Gospel Library. And if you’ve used Gospel Library you know that at the bottom of each chapter there is an icon that allows you to play the audio for that chapter.

So that’s what I did. I started listening to the scriptures and I followed along reading word for word. That’s when it hit me. There’s no such thing as cheating when it comes to scripture study. I started to realize that it wasn’t that I was cheating, it was my pride that made me feel like it was cheating.

By studying the scriptures this way there were multiple benefits.

     1.You can stop at any time to take notes, organize your notes, highlight verses and create links between your notes and other verses.
     2.The speed at which the audio is reading helps you stay focused and doesn’t let you get distracted.
     3.It helps by not letting you get hung up on the harder words or names. Which was another big distraction.

Before I started reading the scriptures this way it was really frustrating to try to learn from reading the scriptures. So I relied heavily on listening to the Gospel Doctrine teachers and what they were teaching on Sunday.

I consider myself an average guy of average intelligence and by using this technique to study the scriptures, I have read The Book of Mormon three times, Doctrine and Covenants once and New Testament once in 6 months. I’ve taken over 300+ notes and now can participate in class discussions. I have no problem remembering scripture stories or who were in them. Plus my motivation to study harder is through the roof. I finally feel like I’m progressing in the Gospel.

In my next blog I'll talk about what to do with your notes and enhancing your ability to remember what you’re learning.

Overcoming problems #4

In describing some of the habits and techniques that I've used to make studying the scriptures more productive, I want to start off by saying, you need to find whatever works for you. Nothing is out of bounds or cheating when it comes to gaining further light and knowledge when it comes to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Everybody learns at their own pace and with their own techniques. I'm going to start by describing some of the things that I have found that work for me, they may or may not work for you. But the point is, to look beyond the things you've been doing that haven't allowed you to achieve the results that you desire.

The first thing and it's a must, is praying before you begin your scripture study. It's like everything else in life, you cannot cook a great meal without going to the store and buying the ingredients. You need to set yourself up for success. You need to ask Heavenly Father to help you in gaining the light and knowledge that you seek. You need to ask that He would allow and help you to learn the things that He would have you learn at that time. He's not going to give you knowledge that He feels you're not ready for. Line upon line precept upon precept. When I'm praying before I start to study the scriptures, I feel like I'm inviting the spirit to attend my scripture studying session. You need to remember that all good things come from God. We can read the scriptures but we can't gain light and knowledge without Heavenly Father helping us. It's not uncommon for me to stop in the middle of studying to say another prayer to help me understand a particular verse or to help clear my mind to feel the promptings of the Holy Ghost. Sometimes we can be so focused on trying to read a particular chapter that we lose sight of learning from that chapter. Let me explain it this way, you can read a particular verse time after time and then all of a sudden you read that same verse and go wow, I never understood that or I don't ever remember seeing that verse. Now you're studying and not just reading. And your study partner (The Holy Ghost) just showed you that verse because you were ready for that knowledge. I call that finding little nuggets of wisdom and it motivates me to study even harder.

In my next post I'll get into what helps me stay focused while reading.

The problems I faced while studying scriptures. #3

Throughout my life anything that I would study would be a challenge. Whether it be for school or my profession I just couldn’t seem to remember it. I think that one of my biggest problems was I read very slow. Most of the time I found myself re-reading the same chapters over and over trying to get the overall idea of what it was trying to tell me. It was not uncommon as I was reading to be distracted by any little thing. Heaven forbid my phone would make a sound telling me I had a text message or there was one of my social media apps telling me there was an update. There went a half hour of study time.

Another problem I ran into as I was reading is I would run across a word or phrase that would trigger  something in my mind and get me to thinking about things other than the material I was reading. I call that chasing squirrels and I did a lot of it.

I think a lot of people would call this being ADD ( Attention Deficit Disorder). I had a real problem just staying focused for any length of time.

Now you couple this with the fact that I made it through high school not being able to spell and having a real difficult time reading and you really end up with a problem on your hands. I could read just about anything but I struggled with the harder words or names. When you stopped to sound out a word then trying to make sure it fit into the right context to check that it was indeed the right word. My mind would be off in left field chasing squirrels again. More lost time causing more re-reading to try to get the meaning of what I was studying.

When you study you take notes, but what if you can’t spell. It makes note taking just about impossible, so you're left with memorizing everything. When I went to grade school in the late 60s and early 70s and was learning to read and write, the first thing they taught us was to spell phonetically. And for some reason I never learned anything past that. To this day I still spell completely phonetically. You can read everything I write the only problem it’s all completely misspelled. I thank Heavenly Father for spell check. I’ve had a very successful career and people often ask how could you do these things and not be able to spell. When I would start a new job I would find and befriend someone usually in the secretarial pool and ask them to proof read my work. I would explain to them my problem with spelling and usually they would take pity on me and helped in any way they could.

So now you’re getting an idea of what I was up against and my struggle to gain light and knowledge through reading the scriptures. And I’m sure that there are many other brothers and sisters out there that struggle from the same things in which I do. I really hope that in some way the habits and techniques that I now use will help them.

In my next blog post ill start to explain some of the tools I use to overcome these problems.

So what started it all? #2

Before I get started in describing the habits and techniques that I've found that helped me start studying the scriptures in a more productive way, let me express a few things that have come to mind this evening.

I'm only posting this blog in the hopes that some of the habits and techniques that I've found to be helpful to me will in some way help others. I'm sure that I'm not the only one that has struggled with studying the scriptures. But that being said, anything that I post in this blog is completely just my feelings and opinions. Nothing in this blog should be taken as the position of The Church of Jesus Christ Latter-day Saints as to the content of this blog.

Okay now that that little disclaimer has been made let's move on.

I cannot begin to describe the excitement that I feel when going to Gospel Doctrine or any of my other classes during the 3-hour block of meetings. It wasn't long ago that I felt lost or left behind because I didn't know the material that we were studying that day. It wasn't that I didn't have the material or didn't read the material prior to class, it was the fact that I couldn't retain what I have read. So I felt that I couldn't add to the class or participate in the discussions out of fear of looking like I was completely out in left field.

These feelings that I was having at church made me feel that my church attendance in a lot of ways was in vain. I felt that I wasn't achieving more knowledge or participating or even progressing. These feelings went on for most of my church life, about 27 years. Up until the last 6 or 7 months when I started trying something different. Like I said in my previous post it was like going through life without sight then all of a sudden being able to see. It was very exciting to finally be able to read the scriptures and retain the knowledge that I was gaining. For the first time I was able to recall stories and dates and parables from the scriptures that added to the discussions I was having at that time with other members. Not to mention the feelings from the spirit that I was finally progressing and gaining light and knowledge. I had a hard time containing my enthusiasm to the point that at times I would feel like I was taking over the class. When the class had ended I often would apologize to the teacher and tell them I just get so excited it's hard for me to keep my mouth shut.

In my next post I will begin to describe some of the problems I was having in studying the scriptures and why I just couldn't retain what I was reading.

My first thoughts starting this blog. #1

We need to ask ourselves what's the most important thing in our lives. To me the answer is quite obvious, gaining light and knowledge of our Heavenly Father and  savior Jesus Christ. Not only are we to learn from the scriptures but we are also to take upon ourselves the name and attributes of our savior. This can be as easy or as complex as you want it to be. 

I've been a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for going on 30 years now but up until the last six or seven months I didn't really have a firm grasp on what the scriptures were trying to tell me. I believe this came from not truly understanding how to study the scriptures or finding the methods that work best for me. In my blog posts I'm going to try to describe the things in which I did that opened up a whole new world as far as scripture study.

It was nothing extraordinary or complex, just finding the paths that allowed me to stay focused, stay organized and retain what I was learning. I cannot begin to describe the sheer joy and enthusiasm I was gaining from finally being able to understand the scriptures. The best way I can describe it is like going through life without the blessing of sight then all the sudden being able to see for the first time.

I'm sure there are other people that have similar study habits like I had that don't allow them to be successful at studying the scriptures and gaining the knowledge that they desire. 

I just hope that in some way the things that I've learned and will post in this blog can help someone else reach their study goals.