Sitting in Sunday School a few weeks ago, we were talking about scripture study and how we needed to be reading with our families. While I’m sure that most of us could be doing better at this, it can be difficult to find motivation and creativity every day. This can easily lead to us skipping the reading and missing out on the spirit. These are a few ideas to help your scripture reading be a joy!
1. Prepare a Lesson for Practice
Did you end up having to leave class to take care of your kid? Do you want to dig in further than the teacher went in their lesson? Are you the teacher and have weeks of lessons to prep?
Maybe you aren’t the teacher, but you can always go through scriptures and talks and make up the lesson that you would have given (plus save your ideas for when you get a teaching calling!).
2. Scripture Picture Journaling
Image from constancedenninger.blogspot.com
This creative practice has been adopted by many Christian groups for a while now, and the internet is overflowing with ideas on this subject! If you don’t want to color in your scriptures you could always pick up an extra economy set just for coloring, do the drawings on vellum craft paper to glue in, or dedicate a page to the topic in your journal.
We did this as a Young Women’s activity a few weeks ago, and we were amazed at the amount of creativity we found, even in the “but I can’t draw” crowd. It's also helpful if you want to learn where your favorite verses and stories are since you can just flip through until you see the right picture!
3. Rabbit Hole—on Purpose!
This can be loosely defined as the practice of following footnote after footnote, often getting led to topics completely unrelated to the one you started on. While this can be a distracting practice when you are trying to find the answer to a question or prepare a lesson/talk, many times this can be incredibly helpful to discover some of those answers to questions that you didn’t know to ask.
4. Quote-Hunting
Image from melonheadsldsillustrating.blogspot.com
There are a lot of ways to do this. If you are reading a talk, you can follow the footnotes or find a verse that popped into your mind. You could also read a few verses and then use lds.org and other internet sources to find quotes from general authorities or well-known philosophers that correspond. Either way, print it out or write it down and put it in your scriptures to help with future inspiration and talks!
5. "Oh, My Heavens!"
If you have a very short time to read, a fun practice is to open your scriptures to a random page, and start reading until you find a power statement or something that makes you stop and think, “Oh, my heavens. That’s why I turned to this page.” This is great if you have a shorter window of time and aren't able to read a whole chapter or story.
6. Studying the Primary Lessons
This is a fantastic way to simplify things and to keep up with what your kids are learning in church. All of the Primary books and stories can be found onlds.org.
Lead image from Shutterstock
