In accordance with my New Year's resolution, I've been reading the Bible every day.  Sure it's only been a few days, but it's going well. 

I've read through the entire Bible twice in the past.  I came to the conclusion that I wanted to read through the Bible because I had been a Christian for a while and decided that, as a Christian, I should try to know what I'm talking about.  So I started reading 5 chapters a day, right before I went to bed at night.  This was during college, and it went through the summer after my freshman year and into my sophomore year.  I finished it in about 8 or 9 months.  I kept a list of all the interesting verses I found and I asked smart people a bunch of questions on issues I encountered.  All in all, it was a good experience, but it felt like more of a task and less of a getting-to-know-God-better type of thing. 

The second time I did it, I started in October of 2004.  I read through it with Wendy because I figured it would be good to talk to someone about what I was reading, knowing that the person would be reading the same thing as me.  We followed a schedule from this site (also here) that had us read from a different book of the Bible each day.  Each of the seven days of the week was assigned a different topic of books:  Epistles, Law, History, Psalms, Poetry, Prophecy, and Gospel.  It seemed like a good idea because it would avoid getting boring.  It turned out to be a relatively good way to do it, but it was very confusing because we were simultaneously reading from 7 different books and following 7 different stories/plots/lessons. That made it a bit complicated. 

So this time, I'm reading through the Bible with a group of people from my Bible study, and we're following the outline in Our Daily Bread, which has a "Bible In One Year" segment.  It has us read a couple chapters from the Old Testament and maybe a chapter from the New Testament each day.  It only takes about 15 or 20 minutes to do the reading, and it's much easier to follow just 2 different stories/plots/lessons.  When I finish it at the end of 2006, I'll hopefully remember to write about it. #religion