I’ve rarely made New Year’s resolutions:  it seems like a giant way to set myself up for failure.  “Hello, self esteem, another way that you didn’t measure up”.

Or so said my former self until I had the realization:  I don’t have to make a bunch of resolutions:  I could just do one.  And there are no NYr rules (that I know of:  if there are, I don’t want to know:  keep that door firmly shut:  la la la, I can’t hear you) that state I have to do a BIG resolution.  It could be small.  Insignificant.

So I started flossing.  Yes, that was a NYr:  and I actually followed through.

The next year it was drinking enough water.  And as you can ask my husband, who trips over water bottles (reusable, BPA-free) scattered throughout the house and the car, I tend to keep decently hydrated.

When I lived in Boise, I decided my NYr would be to read my Bible in one year following the handy dandy guides in the back.  It was a Bible I got “free” while attending YouthQuake (you know, the “free” stuff that comes with a hefty conference fee).  It was an amazing experience.  Boise was a ‘desert’ time for me, a time where God met me (kicking and screaming, or rather twitching due to my unknown blood sugar issues) to spend some quality one-on-one time together through God’s Word.  It hurt, but it hurt so good.

A few years later when I started doing “things to help keep depression a pacified, happy camper” coping mechanisms, one of the suggestions was to read a Proverb every day because it stimulates the frontal lobe, and when the frontal lobe is happy, everyone is happy.  I got bored after a while (there’s only so many Proverbs, and only so many times I like to read about how it’s better to sleep on a roof in the rain than in a house with a cranky woman), so now I read some part of the Bible at breakfast time, whatever interests me.  I just finished reading the Narrated Bible version of the Gospels (which you, as some of my pastors who I won’t directly name but might reference later on, might think is a verbal version of the Bible, but really it’s just chronological).  Now I’m moving onto Judges, because my dad believes (after much study, and of course, a little Godly insight) that we’re in a time period similar to that of Judges (I’ll go into that someday later), so I figure it might be good to familiarize myself with the patterns of that book.

My friend/fellow blogger/pastor/fellow Newberg-Boise-Newberg mover Gregg posted about reading the Bible in a year.  He’s opting to subscribe to an RSS feed through Google Reader.  Sweet:  I’m glad that works for him!  I, however, am a skimmer, and would read simply for consumption rather than transformation.  Must get all feeds read!  What’s that about edification?

What’s been helpful for me is to subscribe to a podcast called The Daily Audio Bible.   The host reads through the Bible in a year – Old Testament, New Testament, Psalms, Proverbs selections each day.  He closes with prayer, thoughts, and prayer requests from the DAB community (which I rarely listen to, but am glad there’s space for such a thing).  I also listen to PrayStation Portable (interesting, not having grown up in a liturgical setting) as well as Pray As You Go.  In the morning I listen as I get up, get ready, and open up the house (feeding all the creatures – two and four-legged, blinds, mental list for the day, etc.).

So there’s my liturgy of sorts.  A little different than monks and nuns probably intended, but would you expect any different from Quaker Sister Mary Aj?