Fickelish Faith

I plan on sharing more of my observations and thoughts on faith in the future. It really helps me to have an audience. Knowing that someone (hopefully at least one!) will read my ramblings helps to push me beyond the “easy” responses while journaling my way through devotional time. I want to move past the cliche and into a meatier understanding of God’s Word. Hopefully my readers will find that to be true of my future posts.

For today, however, I’m going to talk about how I do my devotions. First, I want to be up front and honest in saying that I don’t always do daily devotions. If I were disciplined enough to wake early and “put God first” I probably could, but I don’t. I’ve never been a morning person, and when I do have to wake early, it takes a solid hour before I’m really coherent. I’m in a stupor for a while before the synapses in my brain actually acknowledge that my body is up and moving around.

So, I do my devotions in the evening, after I get home from work, after I feed and put to bed two of the kids, and after I make dinner for the rest of the family. It’s a top priority of my “at home” list that I work from. But, unfortunately, there are days when I disregard that list. It may be because the kids are freaking, or we have plans, or because all I want to do is sink into an oversized chair and prop my feet up on an ottoman and binge watch a serial killer documentary. (Yeah, I’ve become obsessed, but that’s for a different blog post.)

Also, I only pick my favorite responses to share--the responses I feel like are important or particularly insightful. So, no, I don’t always strike revelatory gold. I don’t just open the Bible and discover a super cool idea or thought. Some days I stare at a verse or story and think, “Huh? What the crap?” Those are the entries in my Bible journal you don’t get to see. So don’t ask, ok?

When I do finally get to do devotions, I have found that I enjoy using my iPad and Apple Pencil. I have tried physical paper and pen, but those get lost or used by the kids. I have tried using a digital document, but it gets boring. I switched to iPad note-taking a few years ago and haven’t looked back. The game changer was, and always has been, the Apple Pencil. I’ve used many styluses in my day, and the Apple Pencil has always blown them out of the water.

I started with an app called Notability. It worked pretty well, and I liked that it was cloud based, so I could take notes on any of my Apple devices. Recently, however, I started using GoodNotes. I believe GoodNotes is more popular than Notability, so I’m not exactly sure how I missed it when I was looking for a note-taking app to begin with. What I like about GoodNotes is that I can set up files to organize my notes. Within the files I can have different notebooks. You can import PDFs and images to serve as backgrounds and covers. It’s highly customizable.

I also learned you can add stickers and different objects into the notes. That led me to creating my

own template for Bible journaling. I’ll insert a picture of a blank one here for you to see, or steal, or ignore. Whatever. I include a particular verse that stood out to me. I record a title (or steal one if I choose), ask myself what the verse tells me about humanity, as well as what we learn about God. The final section allows me to record thoughts, or a

prayer, or whatever, that I want for that day. This approach has helped me to see how God connects with and interacts with His creation.

As I said earlier, I hope to post more actual reflections on faith, but wanted to make sure that I was upfront and honest about my walk, my faith, and my inabilities to get up on time.