Followers

Thursday, September 20, 2012

GO AHEAD....MARK IT UP!!

Beautiful setting.

This is the place I sit for 1-2 hours everyday from sometime in mid May to hopefully sometime in October.
It truly is my most favorite spot in our yard. I am offered this spectacular view every single day. What you can't see is beyond, which has countless pine trees that scatter the horizon and the sky everyday is so so blue.

I come out in the morning, with my coffee , bible and journal, followed by both my labs, who everyday try and get me to throw their toys, and I tell them "NO, not now".
So off they go exploring our yard-which is about 1 1/2 acres that is fenced in. Then they chase each other for awhile and eventually come and lay by me ( I swear their biggest job in life is to find the best place in that moment to lay down...are all labs this lazy?).

Each day depending on my schedule for the day, I am allowed to enjoy this beauty for quite some time.
It is where God meets with me . Its where I spend time reading His Word, praying, meditating and interceding for dear loved ones and friends.

One day in the summer of 2009, absent-mindly, I left my bible on the table and went down to camp.
Hours later I returned, and I knew something was up. Our son Todd was visiting and he had a sheepish grin on his face.
"I don't know how to tell you this Mom, but Cody (the yellow very mischevious lab) got hold of your bible."

This dog did not just get ahold of my Bible, she ate it. She literally ate the entire leather cover and then managed to strew about700 pages all across our front lawn. Todd had picked up the pieces and put them all in a paper bag.
There was no way this bible could be repaired.

Needless to say, I was upset. LIVID is more like it. I went to our front gate , opened it and told Cody to run away.
I really think this was the most mad I can ever recall being. It wasn't just a bible. It was MY BIBLE- the one I had used for 23 years. The Bible with all my underlining, all my highlighting, all my notes. Oh yeah, I was upset.

The following May, Kristi, Adam and Kellen (Jax wasn't born yet) gave me a new bible for Mother's Day.
This morning I was reminded of this while I sat outside again having time with Jesus. September is the month every year that I spend listening to the LORD as I try and pick verses to pray for each of my family.
Seventeen years ago, the pastor at the church we were then attending, said that he did this for his family and I decided to give it a try. He must have told us about it in September because ever since , this is the month I take to find these verses.

I absolutely love doing this. And yes, it actually does take me about a month to find a verse for each ten family members. And I love that my new bible-about 2 1/2 yrs old now, is marked up ...that it helps me look for verses.
I absolutely treasure the time I have to look over -skim thru, the entire word of God , looking for that specific verse for that specific person in my family. How fun it is to see verses that I have picked in the past for them.
In my old bible, I would write their name or their initials and the year by the verse. It seemed like an arduous task to do that once again; so I now just started from the year 2010.

Fortunately, I had written down each years verses at the back of the bible in my Cody eaten bible and because of Todd's foresight to see I might want whatever could be salvaged, I still have that paper and its now in the back of my bible!!

Another phenomenal thing about picking verses fro my family is that I pray them a couple of times a week for them and eventually I now have 10 memorized Scriptures that I probably wouldn't otherwise have done. Unfortunately, with age, I don't remember all of them word for word, but I do remember the gist of each verse.

So my advise to you is mark up your bible...highlight away, scribble notes....It makes it alot easier to find things later on, and you will be glad you did.