Friday

Writing out your prayers is a great way to make yourself slow down and focus. Sarah is planning to do this regularly. I would encourage each of you to try it at least once if you haven't already. I'm thinking about making this a part of my spiritual p90x. So many ideas!!!

Thursday

Continuing on with the spiritual p90x theme...Julie gave some really good thoughts yesterday to help me develop my spiritual exercise plan. They actually fit in quite nicely with the whole p90x premise. Let me explain how that physical program works: there are actually twelve different workouts. The idea is that to keep your body making progress, your muscles cannot become comfortable with the workout or you stop progressing. The program is divided into three blocks of four weeks each. The first three weeks you spend learning the workouts, then you get a week "off" in which you do mostly cardio and stretching to allow the muscles to heal before the next block begins. It never gets easy.

So Julie's suggestion about using the Peter passage fits this. There are several things to work on there. These things could be rotated in and out of a 3 month program. As far as specific activities...I'm thinking memory work, study, prayer, encouraging others, choosing a particular area of behavior that causes problems and setting up some kind of tracking system to monitor progress while studying that area to change thinking habits, making thankfulness lists... I have thought about taking a news story and writing a biblical response... I'm looking for ideas to encourage applying principals that are learned. Ideally I would be molding my thoughts to scriptural passages. So keep those ideas coming!

Wednesday

Yesterday I read 1 Timothy 1-4 and the thought that stood out to me this time was "...discipline yourself for the purpose of godliness..." As you know I'm working my way through the P90X program and it has been tough. In this context Paul is telling Timothy that bodily discipline (or exercise is only of a little profit but godliness for all things. So I started thinking about just how one would go about exercising spiritually. All the usual thoughts came: prayer, study...but I wondered if maybe it shouldn't be a little more intense - like the P90X. How could I make my spiritual exercise as challenging as my physical exercise program? I have some ideas that I want to explore but would be interested in yours. Any thoughts? After I hear from you, I think I'll work on setting some specific goals and steps to get there. I'm afraid I will have to post them somewhere because I am so easily distracted with daily things that I forget what I planned to do sometimes. I guess for me that is part of growing older.

Tuesday

The Word of God is called our sword. It is how God speaks to us and it is also a wonderful tool. Sarah mentioned color coding verses yesterday in your Bibles to help find certain topics that maybe you need to use often. I do this. I only have three catagories. Pink is for the passages that are specific to women and wives. Green is for laziness (a continuing problem I fight). Yellow is for passages dealing with authority - useful when studying with non-believers. I'd love to hear if you do this and what catagories/colors you use. Bailee has noticed this in my Bible and will sometimes point out that I should highlight something because it fits into the catagory. Aren't kids great?

Monday again

Good morning, ladies. May is already halfway gone. The garden is calling my name...SHOUTING my name. So many distractions would call me away from listening to God speak through His word. It only takes a few minutes to read enough to keep your mind busy all day. Be sure to feed your soul.