Since it is the New Year…

I wanted to re-post this.  I have received a lot of comments from you (thank you so much – they help keep me motivated!) about your New Year goals being to have more meaningful Gospel study, so…

I wanted to show you the best thing I have ever done to study!

My Scripture Journals.  I love them.  You know when people ask that question:  ”What would you save if you could save one thing in your house?”  I don’t have to even think about.  It is these.  My scripture journals.  I can’t even express what these mean to me .  There is so much history to them.  They represent hours of discovery and insight and lessons learned.  To you, they are just books that you have never seen before.  But to me there are stories that come to mind by just looking at the different books.  The one peeking out of the bottom went with me to Guatemala.  The striped one I made with the young women in my ward.  The one that is open is my favorite. And the blue one was my first truly successful scripture journal.  I have another stack of journals that are failed attempts – do you have a stack of those?

These are not personal daily journals…

These are records of things I have learned, personal notes, scriptural insights, study pages, quotes, conference talks, and outlines of talks I have given.    So much of what is in there would have been long forgotten - so what a blessing it is to just open up and read, and then remember, and then build upon that. For years, I believed that keeping a personal record of what I am learning would be beneficial, but I wasn’t very good at the execution of it.  I needed a system.  And after years and years of trying different things – I found something that works.

Topics!!

I put topics on the top of each page.  This can be done 2 different ways.

1-  You could write topics at the top as you study and add topics as you go

2-  You could write topics that you want to study at the top of each page right when you get your journal

I typicall do the second one – so when I learn something about that topic, I turn to that page and write about it. Either way, leave some pages at the beginning of your journal to keep your own table of contents.

Here is one of my pages about the Second Coming

Here is a study I did on Doctrine and Covenants 4

A church history timeline

I also put in a lot of talks from conference.  I just copy and paste them onto a Word document, put them in columns, and shrink down the font.

Then I just tape them in.

So lets say you are asked to give a talk, or a lesson on this subject…  you already have so much gathered!  And they are things that you felt were valuable enough to write down, and if you felt it was valuable, others will likely feel the same way. Plus your “line upon line” learning may speed up.  It does for me because I don’t forget as much.

This is Doctrine and Covenants 77.   And Revelation 4.  How would you have drawn it?

A study on the Priesthood

Truth

A study on Mary.

I love her.  She has other pages too.

My ultimate goal is to have at least one completed journal for each of my children to inherit.  And a set of marked scriptures.  I don’t care about them inheriting the things I have shoved into my backpack when traveling in far nations.  I care about this. Then when I’m not around anymore, I can still help them. Here is how you could set it up: scripture journals