The Sound of Forehands Clapping

So I’ve been a Christian for about eight years and I have never read the Bible cover to cover. As I looked over the table of contents in my Bible today I saw a large number of books that I simply have not ever read. I am not sure what many of the Old Testament books are even about!

I’ve never used a read-the-Bible-in-a-year reading plan, but a few days ago a friend posted a link on his blog to another blog going over some of these popular reading plans.  One of the plans stood out to me:

The Discipleship Journal Reading Plan

With this plan you read through the entire Bible once.

The unique advantage of this plan is that there are “catch-up” days:

• To prevent the frustration of falling behind, which most of us tend to do when following a Bible reading plan, each month of this plan gives you only 25 readings. Since you’ll have several “free days” each month, you could set aside Sunday to either not read at all or to catch up on any readings you may have missed in the past week.
• If you finish the month’s readings by the twenty-fifth, you could use the final days of the month to study passages that challenged or intrigued you.

Bethlehem Baptist Church makes available the bookmark-method for this plan:

• Bookmarks for 1st half of the year
• Bookmarks for 2nd half of the year

So I printed out the PDF with all the readings and the check boxes and put it in my Bible. Today I sat down to do the first reading, but I had somehow lost the reading plan already! I knew I was supposed to read Genesis 1, Psalm 1, Matthew 1 and Acts 1 though so it was okay.

I could reprint the reading plan, but eventually I’m just going to lose it again anyways. Tonight I’m going to start writing a little web app that will email me what I am supposed to read every day. If I reply back to the email I’ll be telling the app that “I read the passages today” and the next day it will email me the next reading. If I don’t reply to the email then it will email the same passages for the next day.

It is a pretty straight forward plan. There are a few things where people could help if they were interested. If you know RoR you could help with part of the coding. There will need to be a web interface and then a background job. If you don’t know what I am talking about, but would be interested in helping fear not! I also need someone who can read English to help me get the daily readings from the PDF format into one I can use.

If you want to help or if you would be interested in using such a service then let me know!

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 4th, 2009 at 8:42 pm and is filed under Bible, Resources and Tools, Self Discipline. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.