This 390 page, Bible Journal Freebie has been in the making for 2 years!

 

It is amazing to think that this all started with a hope that one day I could read the Bible from cover to cover. When my daughter was born, it occurred to me one day that she (and my son) would have a ton of questions as they grow up, and I need to have Biblical answers. It isn’t okay in my mind to teach them based on my own instinct as a mother. I am only a human being. Therefore, I made up my mind that I would take the plunge and read the Bible from beginning to end.

I am here to tell you that I did! Yay! Did I do it in a year like I hoped? Nope. It took my 2 years.

The deal is, I was guilty of spending hours and hours behind a screen and not spending time with the Lord on a daily basis. So, I made reading the Bible a daily, important part of my routine. My little ones know that I won’t play with them until I have had that time and my husband has even played with them so that I could have that time. It was a priority to me.

Here are some amazing things that happened, just from reading God’s Word as often as I can:

1. I learned stories from the Bible that I forgotten.

If a preacher has preached on a story in the Bible, there is a huge chance I have heard it. The details of the events of the Bible can be so interesting, even if you have heard the story many times within a church.

     2. If you make it a priority, your family does too.

Not only did I see my little one go get her Bible and sit next to me (to read her entire Bible in 2 minutes flat), but everyone will adjust to that time being the Lord’s. They know the importance of giving that time to me because I am a different person because of it. That quiet time (but mostly not quiet) grounds me.

      3. God came into more conversations with others.

It’s just like reading a good book or watching your favorite television show. You can’t help but talk about it with the people around you because that is how you are spending your spare time. If you were a writer, you’d always be talking about the act of writing. For me, Scripture and stories came into conversations without trying to really. It became such an important part of my life that I couldn’t help but talk about.

     4. I felt like I began to see more of a clearer picture of the Lord.

Sometimes pastors choose safe sermons because it is safer to talk about certain stories and not others. Someone asked me what I learned and I literally said that preachers only teach from a third of the Bible. Okay, I don’t know if it’s a third, but there was a lot of stories I had never even heard of.

    5. In the moments of insecurity or doubt, my fears were immediately trumped by scripture coming to mind.

I am guilty of letting fear and worry creep in. It’s just human nature. Call me crazy, but I believe the Holy Spirit speaks words of hope as soon as the thoughts of fear come now. Do I know and have I memorized a lot fo Scripture reading the Bible this way? No, but bits and pieces of verses come to mind at the right time.

There were days when I just have to forgive myself.

When I got to Leviticus, I thought I’d have to quit soon. Law after law I read. It wasn’t a story, but many many laws. When I got to the lineage of families, I read each name, but wanted to quit. There were times in the Old Testament that I had to stop reading simply because I didn’t understand why events had to play out in different ways. I just wanted to quit.

Reading the Bible from cover is cover is something that I hear a lot of people say they want to do one day, but it is tough. There are so many burdens, joys, responsibilities that we put first. We have to sometimes. There are little people relying on us to make that meal and a pile of laundry needing (desperately) to be put away. There are many reasons I came up with to excuse myself not to read it that day. I just had to choose to let other things go for the sake of my relationship with the Lord.

 

God has to continually refine me.

What happens in the middle of all of this? I become a mother of two. The greatest blessing anyone offered to me and also the most sacrificial love I have ever experienced. Whereas my human nature is to stick to me being always right with my children, I learned to ask my children forgiveness on the hard days. In fact, when my little one has a meltdown that day, we ask God together for Him to forgive her. In the moments when she is thinking of herself (she’s a toddler), I try to guide her towards a mindset of serving others. If I don’t read this Bible of mine, I promise things would be different. It takes everything in me to control my tongue, but I can now.

 

Let’s get back to the story of creating my 390 page Bible Journal Freebie.

I started making a journal based on the Read Scripture App Bible sectioned that I had used while reading the Bible. It took weeks of learning Adobe InDesign and weeks of typing, tweaking. My artwork is throughout the entire thing, handwritten font, and lines for prayers, questions or just doodling. I mean, I poured my heart into this thing! I just couldn’t decide on the right time to put it up in my shop, so I left it alone. There is no way I can encourage others to read the Bible from Genesis to Revelation without me doing it first.

So, there it sat as a file on my computer for a year. I finally finished reading the Bible cover to cover this past week, and was debating about celebrating with putting it in my shop. Honestly, I had been secretly praying that God would move in my business. It is so hard not to play the comparison game with others. All I saw was others succeeding and me hanging on. As I prayed, (believe it or not) I heard gentle words come in my head to just give this journal away. WHAT?! I tried convincing myself I deserved a profit from it. All that time, and effort just to give it away? I was quickly reminded how selfish and human I was.

I remember thinking to myself that this plan would completely flop, but okay God. Let’s do this.

Fast forward to this past weekend.

I spent one week sharing that I’d have a freebie for whoever wanted it on Saturday. I was certain it would bless maybe a few people, but not many. Then, I realized that God was moving. I had one person after the next person saying that they wanted this freebie. I offered it to whomever I could and many people asked for me to send it their way.

Here were some of the comments that completely floored me:

“Being obedient to the Lord’s calling can sometimes be challenging, so thank you for being an encouraging light!”

“I’ve only read through the Bible once but I’ve been wanting to do it again. Also, thank you for making this free, we are in a bit of a pinch financially since my hubby lost his job a few weeks ago and this truly is a blessing.”

“You ought to copyright, print and sell these.”

“Amanda spent two years reading the entire Bible, putting her heart, spirit, and even her own art work into this beautiful journal.”

“Have you ever actually read the Bible cover to cover? It hit me one day that I had read tons of books, but never the whole Bible. I’ve been working on reading the Bible cover to cover for over 2 years now… still so far from finished. But this beautifully designed journal is inspiring me to keep going.”

“You will no doubt see so much beauty in giving away your Bible journal. His word doesn’t every return void.”

“Amanda Stores, This verse came to mind as I was thinking about your testimony. ‘You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts. 2 Corinthians 3:3.”

God is moving through this journal.

The vulnerability that people have had with me in direct messages has given me this larger perspective that people are looking for hope. They are looking for peace in a crazy, COVID-19 world right now. Jobs are being furloughed, lives lost, economy completely trashed, children homeschooled, seniors missing graduation, marriages split, but my God never fails. He is moving beside us as long as we are seeking Him.

Do you know the pain that has happened to those close to us, right in the same week as finishing this Bible?

2 marriages are failing of very close people in our lives. My husband is repeatedly exposed to COVID-19 from working as a physician assistant in the hospital and wears a mask around our children. Illness and surgeries are waiting to happen from close family. Our friends have incredible job positions that have completely fallen by the wayside with only one person working in the home. Our church just applied for a forgivable loan to keep the staff payroll from lack of tithing.

There is a lot of deep, deep pain that creeps in on me with every passing day. Yet, I remind of story after story of how God has moves through His word. The Psalms of David crying out to God in the middle of his oppression.

I repeat, my God never fails.