Family Scripture Study

I just lapped myself in the Book of Mormon. My personal reading Saturday night ended in Alma 43, and our family reading on Sunday did too.

Growing up, we were not a family that read the scriptures together and prayed together, though there were periodic attempts at Family Home Evening, though my father went with pretty unusual topics. We prayed at meals, which could not have been more formulaic if we had specific recited prayers, but after my father stopped speaking to me the prayers kind of ended, and family dinners were happening less too. I did not mean to sabotage the spiritual growth and intimacy of my family, but also I kind of didn't.

I tried to read in the scriptures daily, but when I would finish something it would sometimes take me a while to get started on something else, and everyone had read the Book of Mormon at least once (probably twice), but things changed slowly and then built up.

It started with Brother Maurer co-teaching a class with Brother Weed on the teachings of John. We did not know Brother Weed yet, though we would become quite fond of him, but we already liked Brother Maurer a lot, and my sisters thought we should take the class. Obviously, this covered the Gospel of John, his three epistles, and Revelation. They generally covered three chapters a week.

The classes were good, but somehow we ended up missing quite a few. One night when they were asking me if we could skip (again), I said it was okay as long as they read all of the chapters personally, so that they still knew the material.

They agreed, but the reading was slow in happening. Finally I suggested we read them together on Sunday nights, and we started doing that, three chapters a week.

I totally see the value of starting your children on things young, because there was resistance to building up these habits. Sometimes it went smoothly, sometimes there were protests, and pretty much any time there was a fight, it didn't happen. Most of the time, though, it did, and as we reached the end of Revelation, it didn't feel right to stop. We decided to just read the rest of the Gospels too, and it just worked out that with a few extra sessions around Christmas, we were able to read in Luke 2 on Christmas Day. As we finished Luke it was natural to read the Acts, and then we just kind of gave up and read the rest of the epistles. I was worried about this, because I get frustrated with Paul, and most of the epistles are his, but it was okay. Finally, we had read the entire New Testament, and it didn’t feel right to stop.

During all the time that we were snowbound (back in 2008), there were some times when we wanted to read, but Misty was not there, and it did not feel right to go on in our Bible reading without her, so we read a little in the Pearl of Great Price. That seemed like a logical next step, and it’s not a huge commitment because it’s not very long. We started that, and I realized that everyone really needed to be familiar with Genesis first. We shifted to that.

After reading Genesis together we read the Pearl of Great Price, and at that point we realized, okay, this is something we are doing, so we started the Doctrine and Covenants. Since the section length varies so much, instead of going by chapters we moved to doing eight pages a week.

Now we are in the Book of Mormon, right at Alma 43, and doing ten pages a week (meaning that we can finish it in a year). Again, this is probably what everyone has read the most, so that may help for familiarity, and it is good to be reading together. Now people almost never try to get out of it, or get out of it without trying but due to fighting. Somehow, for all our heathen ways we are a scripture reading family.

I am having concerns about what comes next. The obvious choice is the Old Testament—it’s all we have left. It’s also really long, and in parts quite dense. My first time through, all I remembered from the Chronicles was a long list of begats. My second or third time through, I started to notice some more things, but honestly it was only the last time through that it clicked, and I saw a really dynamic counterpart to Kings.

Christ himself referred to “the Law and the Prophets”, so we could read just the Pentateuch and the Prophets, but that still gives us Numbers, and Leviticus has a lot of symbolism and meaning that is cool, but that doesn’t make it easy reading. Besides, there are good things in the History and the Poetry, though I can’t imagine reading Song of Solomon together. (I wish they had just left that part out. The justification of it as a metaphor for Christ’s love for the church is iffy, in my opinion, but I feel too guilty skipping it, because it is there.)

Really, it will just be quite the undertaking. We did not do the New Testament in straight front to back order though, so maybe we will do something more creative with the Old Testament. I don’t know, maybe we should work through a Conference issue first. We still have a few months to figure it out.

But I know that just as it took me several times to get Chronicles, and it took us many tries for scripture reading to become a habit, that persistence is the thing. You have to stick with it, and then the rewards come.

Alma 53 – 58
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