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.