I recently discovered a program to read the Bible in 90 days. At first I thought it was nuts!
After all, I know a lot of people who try to read the Bible in a year and give up. 90 days seemed impossible!
But the more I looked at the program, the more I realized that it was entirely possible.
The website explains that the amount you have to read per day is about 3.5 pages of The Wall Street Journal or 4 pages of USA Today. For me, I looked at the amount of text and realized it was far less than what I might read via email or RSS. (If you buy their Bible they say it’s merely 12 pages a day, but you can follow the plan using any Bible.)
It just looks like a lot because it’s all in one place. But to me, this was something important enough that I wanted to do it.
I started to think about where I do most of my reading. I realized that I read a lot more than I think about either on my laptop or Treo, or listening to audio books in the car. So I wanted to come up with a way to do all those things either on my laptop, or on my Treo, or in the car.
The good news (no pun intended!) is that you can do this for exactly $0 if you want. I have put together a free list of the Bible in 90 Days (aka “BIND”) readings, linked to an online copy of the NIV Bible. Feel free to bookmark that page or save it to your Treo or computer. You can use that to read your daily readings. (If you just want a plain list of the readings you can also get that in PDB, PDF, or MS Word format).
You can also sign up (for free) at http://www.biblein90days.com/progresstracker and they will help you keep track of your progress (as well as link to the readings). The site was not specifically designed for PDAs, but it works fairly well.
If you’re like me and enjoy audiobooks, you might want to checkout The Listener's NIV MP3 Audio Bible by Max McLean ($33/Amazon.com) or NIV Dramatized Audio Bible in MP3 ($50/Amazon.com). The latter comes on 6 CDs with MP3s that you can use in a Palm or iPod, etc. If you want the full audio CD collection it comes on 64 CDs ($63/Amazon.com). (All prices in USD as of this writing.) I do recommend that you listen to a sample of the audio Bible before you buy. You want to make sure the narrator(s) sound good to you. The ones I have linked to are dramatized, but there is also a voice only version of the NIV Audio Bible.
Personally I have been listening to the Bible while reading it and find that it helps to focus my attention. It takes about an hour a day to listen (about 40-45 minutes if you are just reading). Having someone read it helps prevent me from getting bogged down in the list of names, etc, and it’s easy enough to pause and go back if you need to. Remember the goal isn’t how fast you can get it done, but to read it for meaning.
For a true Palm experience, checkout the Zondervan NIV Study Bible CD which normally sells for $30 but there is a $15 rebate if you buy from Palm.com between June 1, 2007 and August 31, 2007. (Offer valid in the US only, sorry.) The NIV Palm Bible also includes the King James Version (KJV), American Standard Version (ASV), Darby's New Translation (DNT), World English Bible (WEB), and Young's Literal Translation (YLT). (The KJV can be found for free in various formats, including Palm and audiobook, since it is out of copyright.)
If you’ve ever tried reading through the Bible and failed, this is a great opportunity to try again. The plan keeps you moving along quickly so you never feel like you’re getting stuck in any one place for too long — anyone who has gotten stuck in Numbers, Leviticus or Deuteronomy knows what I mean!
Think of all those times and places where you find yourself with a spare few minutes where you might check your email or RSS feeds. What if you could use that time for something more?
Hint/Tip: I went to the HTML list of readings and loaded the next week’s worth of readings into Blazer one day at time, and then saved each day for “Offline Viewing” Blazer (aka “Web”) has a bunch of spots for bookmarks, and I have a whole lot of empty spaces in mine! When I work my way through those, I’ll delete them and load the next week’s readings. That way I don’t have to go hunting for them or even wait for them to load. They’ll just be waiting.