Why blog thru the bible?

I have always been fascinated with the Bible. At a very young age I remember pulling out the old family Bible that my parents had. You know the kind you get as a wedding gift it's big and white and in the front there are all those pages to write down your family tree, marriage dates, baptisms, births and deaths. I couldn't read then but I would flip the pages to the middle where the colorful pictures on thick paper are and I would stare at those pictures and try and figure out to which story that belonged.

Sometime later my older sister got a book of the Psalms in big print. She was already reading, and I was jealous. She received her first Bible before me also, but I lucked out because hers was in the King James version and when I finally received my first Bible it was in the easier to read NIV.  It was under the tree Christmas of 1988, and I was 7 years old and I couldn't have been more thrilled! Reading it at that age was a challenge, but I sure did try hard.

One Sunday when I was 11 years old I was sitting in the church pew as I did most Sunday mornings and my pastor, Steve Troxel was preaching on how important the Bible is to our Christian walk. He even went as far as to say that we should make it a priority to read through the Bible at least once a year. I remember sitting there thinking, "Oh my, I have had my Bible for 4 years now and I have not read through it all the way even once...I'm way behind." So I made a commitment to read it cover to cover for the first time. It actually took me 18 months to read it. I finished it the night before I left on my first of many trips to Mexico with my youth group to build houses in the colonias outside Reynosa.

Since then I have read through the Bible many times (though not once a year), and have studied it in different ways and intensities at different times. It still remains the most fascinating of all books to me. It has really been one of the constants in my life. Even in times of doubting my faith it has continued to have that same tug on me as it did when I was 4 and 7 beckoning me to open it and flip through the pages.

So just recently I got the urge to begin again and when I came across something in the first chapters of Genesis that I had never really noticed before I got the idea to blog my way through this time. A sort of public extension of my personal journaling. Who knows, maybe others will join me on the journey and be encourage.