Advent + Daily Bible Verse + Memory Review = A Real Season

What are you doing for Advent? Here’s a new option: get a new skill, try a new prayer, and stay mindful of the season – all at once.

If you don’t renew your memories, you lose them. I’ve often had trouble making time for reviews, because I’ve seen them as gruntwork, not opportunities for thinking. But now I’ve found a new approach – make reviews part of a season. Like Advent.

Advent starts in a couple weeks. If you celebrate Advent, and you’re also interested in memorizing parts of the Bible, why not combine these two projects?

This combination is one of the best parts of my new book, Christmas by Heart. Advent needs a habit, and memorizing needs to be treated as a habit. The two needs snap together. The two desires strengthen each other. Perfect.

Advent is New Habit Time

Memorizing the Bible, or any text, is all about starting a new habit. You need to do a little every day. Every day, you learn one new verse, and you renew the verses you’ve already learned.

Starting a habit is never easy. But when Advent rolls around, we’re already geared up to do something new. We’ve got a big, wide “habit” slot, ready to be filled.

Learning the Bible is a perfect fit. Especially when you learn the Christmas stories from Matthew and Luke.

Daily Review Helps You Celebrate Advent

The synergy gets even better. Learning the Christmas stories during Advent isn’t some good but unrelated new habit, like doing push-ups or cutting back on chocolate. The whole point of Advent is to prepare for Christmas. And every time you review or learn one of these verses, what are you doing? Thinking about Christmas.

The “gruntwork” of review transforms into built-in time to stay mindful.

We’re already searching for a way to stay mindful during Advent, some gravity-defying force that will float us over the usual abyss of Holiday Insanity. Or at least hoist us up periodically for fresh air.

So now we have a new reason to review. We’re keeping the season! The ancient words create a small room of mental peace, a warm cave in the blizzard of holiday obligations.

Which shows the point of memorizing anything in the first place: so you can think about it. We may start out learning the verses to help ourselves stay in the season. But the season itself may also help us remember why we’d want to learn them at all.

I love it when things work together.

And learning verses can be much easier than you think. Read my free opening chapters to get started.

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