🎶🎵 “Read your Bible, (pray every day) x3
Read your Bible pray every day,
And you will grow, grow, grow …”🎵🎶
As that song has so many versions, I prefer to let you allow that young self in you recall those exciting moments and joys you had while singing that song. If you did not sing it or have never met it before, I could have said you missed a HUUUGE, exciting moment in your childhood… but I will not. Haha! Thinking about the excitement and the energy in my younger self, the memory feels too involved to remind me of the thrilling time it had, immediately after the song. Here comes the time for memory verses!
The Sunday school teachers were so generous, “time-wise,” with this moment. Gentle as they were, the demand to remember at least one Bible verse, other than John 3:16, was a dealbreaker. They took their time and showed maturity in the virtue of patience and how they had it in abundance. This left the young me determined to live the song. Reading the Bible left the stage of being only a song and entered every day’s endeavor. Pushed with the wish to ‘shine’ every other Sunday with the power of memory skills, the young me developed the lifestyle of reading the Bible.
That was the first time I personally met the letter of St. Paul to the Romans and fell deeply in love with it. I still love it to date! (Let us not lose the focus here, I do not mean to undermine any other book in the Bible). Romans 8:31 became a pillar to me. In times of love and sorrows, I find it to be my solace.
“What shall we then say to these things? If God be for us, who is against us?” (Romans 8:31, DRA) was my first verse at the surface whenever any new one evaporated from my memory as my hippocampus decided to take a break. I wonder if you have one, too. I am not sure if you have ever thought of having another verse embedded in your heart like I do. “And hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (Romans 5:5, NRSVCE). Or, as it is often summarized, “Hope does not disappoint.”
I find it a good tradition to build if you do not have it yet (better late than never!). And where else is instilling this tradition better than in the young one? Start it in the young ones and they will grow with it as a healthy culture, and they will love it as they mature to know God personally.