Friday Feast, 10-22-10

We wouldn't let ourselves "miss" a meal, yet so often we allow ourselves to miss our time in the Word. We eat three times a day, every day. We do not experience hunger where our stomachs cramp and groan. Yet we allow our souls to to atrophy with malnutrition.

In order to be full - full of love, full of peace, full of compassion, full of the Holy Spirit - we need to eat every day. Feast on the Bread of Life, quench our thirst with the Living Water.

I know this. I have seen evidence of it in my daily life. When I have been in the Word, I can take the day in stride; when I have not, interruptions and delays bring frustration, impatience, irritability, anger. I know this. Yet I still allow myself to miss meals. It's Saturday...I need to sleep in just a little bit...I can get my Bible time in even when the kids are up. It's Sunday...we're going to church...I will get filled up there. We're on vacation...routine is different...I'll get back on track when we get home. Do you make the same excuses I do to skip meals?

I'm tired of listening to my own excuses.

For the next four weeks, I am challenging myself to feast on the Word of God every. single. day. (For me, this means rising before everyone else.) Perhaps you need a bit of a challenge and accountability, too? Would you care to join me?

We won't do anything fancy. We'll just check in here on Fridays, share honestly how we did in the past week, and offer some words of encouragement to one another. There's no Scripture reading schedule - read what God leads you to read, how much He wants you to read, and for how long He asks you to read. There's no fancy calendar to fill in - keep track in any way you want: "X" on a calendar, date in a journal, remember in your head. All we need to do is read the Word, keep track of how many days out of the past 7 we succeeded in meeting our goal, and stop in here on Fridays to share and cheer each other on.

I'll start. Here is my "baseline" from last week:

Saturday - I slept in.
Sunday - I slept in.
Monday - I did a day of the Bible study I was working on, but didn't read anything for myself.
Tuesday - ditto.
Wednesday - ditto.
Thursday - ditto.
Friday - I read a chapter in Exodus. It said repeatedly, "Pharaoh hardened his heart," and I thought to myself that heart-hardening is one of the side-effects of starvation.

If you'd like to join me, let me know in the comments today. You don't have to share how you did last week (as we hadn't begun our challenge yet), but you are welcome to if, like me, you want to see progress from your baseline.

P.S. For those of you who've been around a while and are wondering about my blogging ADD (in other words, you're thinking, "What the heck happened to the M & M posts?!"), I guess I should let you know I decided not to try to do something "regular." I do better with short-term commitments, at least as far as the blogging thing goes. Plus, in January we can all join along in the semi-monthly Siesta Scripture Memory Team on the LPM blog - aka, Beth Moore!