Summer Reading List

Gone are the girlhood days where my only real responsibility was a summer reading list, and upon me are the days where I'm pondering different types of summer reading projects.

As a homeschool mom to a rising first grader, I've been thinking about what types of summer reading I want to do with our six-year-old. We read our first big chapter book together this past school year as a read-aloud and it was such a fun experience for us! The book was The Wild Robot, and while it most certainly would fit Charlotte Mason's definition of "twaddle," it was a good first step for us. Roz the robot captured the hearts of both my children, and our whole family enjoyed watching the movie rendition on Netflix as soon as it made it's debut!

The littlest Brooks child is adamant that she can read books all by herself, thank you very much, and needs no help from any of us. All we offer are the wrong ways to turn the page and a story that is far off her pace. Oh, two-year-olds. :) She has her own reading list, I'm sure.

As for me, I was on the hunt for a new devotional or Bible study to work through on our three-month break from the women's Bible study the kids and I are a part of on Wednesday mornings. It follows the traditional school calendar, and so we get a little summer break.

I kept coming back to this recurring thought I'd been having.

I've never read the whole Bible.

I invited Jesus into my heart as a young, young girl. I know the books of the Bible; I would consider myself quite familiar with scripture. I wandered from my faith for many years, but I've been reading the Bible (mostly) daily now for around six years. Between being raised as a church kid, reading many stand-alone books and even passages of the Bible, completing a handful of devotions and Bible studies, and even writing my own devotional (which took major amounts of Bible studying all on its own) ...

I've still never read the whole Bible.

I don't have a very good reason for that, either. I've had most of my life to do it - I just ... haven't.

And I was starting to feel an itch, or maybe it was more of an ache.

I want to be able to say I've read the whole Bible!

I want God to know that I've loved Him enough to read the whole Bible.

I want to have enough discipline and follow-through to make it through this ancient, holy text.

However, there's a tiny problem.

Perhaps it's similar to your problem.

It's this little thing called ... time.

Where, oh where, will I find the time?

With the weekly Bible study me and the kids attend once a week, I have a daily Bible study to complete and it is fairly in-depth, taking most of the scriptures line by line and pulling them apart to reveal the heart of God. I knew that I couldn't possibly read anything else alongside the group Bible study I've committed to already. Reading the bible even in a year and continuing on with this group study was not a feasible option for this busy mama of two under the age of six.

It seemed like there was really only one solution.

I could read the whole Bible during our summer break from Bible study.

I looked up our start date for Bible study to reconvene and calculated that from our last day of class to our next start date, I had one hundred and eleven days to fill.

I began searching for a reading plan that mapped out how to read the entire Bible in 90 days, and I found one! I began right away. I quickly found that the plan I was following had a few flaws. One, the graphic I snagged off of Google image search was fairly blurry and not at all aesthically pleasing. My second issue is much more of a "me" problem - the daily scripture reading was often not through the end of the chapter. It might stop mid-chapter, it might stop one verse shy of the end of the chapter, it might stop at the beginning of a new chapter! Now, I don't consider myself to be one of those people who has to have everything in a certain order or for everything to be all neat and organized. If you know me in real life, I'm actually the opposite of neat and organized. But I do like completeness. I could never read a book, any book, and make my stopping place anywhere other than the end of a chapter. To stop before the end of the chapter raked across my nerves, flared up something deep within me that said it must be finished, and was just not something I could get on board with doing.

My solution was to just read ahead, finish the chapter, and pick up on the next day.

It didn't take long for that solution to create it's own problem.

I'm telling you all of that to say this in the very annoying way that people who write blog posts sometimes to - long walk for a short drink of water, but here it is:

I made my own reading plan, and with just a little flair. :)

I have been chugging right along (you can follow my progress on TikTok (@authorkristinabrooks), and I just have to tell you, that I am really enjoying reading the Bible this way. I think sometimes the Old Testament has a bad rap of being boring, irrelevant, and slow-moving. Or maybe that's just what I'd heard.

It's not true, though! Some of the stories are jaw-dropping! There is plenty of action and reading at this pace of roughly 10 chapters every day, well, the action surely doesn't seem slow. Even the parts that are a little less captivating, like say where they're counting the numbers of the different tribes of Israel, they pass quickly when you read them all at once instead of dragging it out over the course of several days.

I truly am having the best time reading the Bible as my own summer reading list and I'd love for you to join in on the fun and have your own amazing experiencing reading the Word of God!

Some of my favorite things about reading the Bible so quickly have been:

• the immediate gratification of making quick progress and seeing how many pages, chapters, and books I have checked off my list. I mean, at only 25 days in, I've already read the first eleven books of the Bible.

• being able to easily recall details from stories I read about earlier.

• coming across familiar Bible stories that I remember from my childhood, but have never actually read in the Bible as an adult is fun!

• finding little nuggets like popular verses, song lyrics, and even expressions that I didn't know where Bible verses or didn't know where they were at in the Bible has also been fun!

• God using this journey to bring me just the verses I need at just the right time.

If you are wondering about reading the Bible, if you've never read it like any other book you just can't put down, or if you're on the hunt for a Bible reading plan, consider reading it in 90 days.

I don't know exactly how the Bible got to have this stigma around it being something we have to force ourselves to read. There are different ways of reading the Bible, and while taking your time to read it slowly and study every word, there is something really captivating about reading it like you would read any other book.

What other book out there do people read and stop themselves after a few sentences, or even one chapter? What other book out there do people read only in specific increments and them stop themselves? When you are reading for fun, you are reading as much as you can as fast as you can. You aren't counting the pages and saying "oh, that's enough for one day, I've got to make this last all year!"

No - when reading for fun, we get lost in the pages and devour the book as quickly as we can because we cannot wait to see what happens next!

So then why not do that with the Bible, the greatest love story ever told?

Just today I added something new to my shop - the 90-day Bible reading plan I am using to read the Bible cover-to-cover in a convenient printable file.

Take a look and join me on this journey through the Bible.

Use the #thebiblein90days if you post on social and let's have this catch on so that more and more of us are reading the greatest book of all time.

90-Day Bible Reading Plan - Turquoise Boho Printable

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Thank you for reading!