Week 4 - Mental Real Estate

Wow! Three weeks already. It doesn't seem like it's been that long. And soon to be a month! This is so cool. (I'm still pretty psyched about this whole project.) Here are a few fun things I learned this morning: 1) The Hebrew word for "man" is very similar to the word for "dirt", 2) The Bible is not very clear as to whether springs came up from the ground or if it was mist or...? All we know is that God had put some sort of irrigation system in place to water all of the plants, and 3) 194 yards of 2-inch wide packing tape laminates exactly 28 sticky notes (plus a few mess-ups). Yippee! Time to go shopping. I think I'm going to get some different-colored sticky notes too, once I run out. I think I still have another month's worth of the orange left though.

Something else I was thinking about this morning was the reason I am doing this.

 I've talked about the long-term goal of memorizing the entire Bible in forty-some years, but not so much the short-term goal. That is, filling up my otherwise empty thought space with God's word.

Fixing my thoughts on what is true, and honorable, and right, and pure, and lovely, and admirable - things that are excellent and worthy of praise, as Philippians 4:8-9 says. I've experimented with memorization before with Radicalis, a group of people from my church, and one thing we all said at the end of the one-month period was that it helped us focus our thoughts when our minds began to wander. Paired with fasting, it was a powerful tool for our hearts, helping us to remember God at every moment throughout the day.

After memorizing for a few weeks now, I have realized once again that I have given a huge portion of my mental real estate to mindless wanderings and meaningless strands of thought. So I am encouraged - even if this project utterly fails because of laziness on my part, or a life-changing upheaval of my world rendering me unable to memorize or spend any time with the Lord (although I realize the former is much more likely) - that this is beneficial for my Spirit, and that my mental time is spent much more wisely. And so I will run the race set before me - step by step, moment by moment, living life with the Lord.