I’m blogging!!! I’m blogging!!!. One of my favorite movies is What About Bob. I will let you figure out why. One of my favorite scenes in the movie is a close up of Bob seemingly cutting through the air much like Leonardo DeCapprio in The Titanic, which is not one of my favorite movies. Even though Bob has demonstrated that one of his many greatest fears is water he appears to be sailing. And in this scene he is crying out to everyone around, “I’m sailing! I’m sailing! You really connect with the power of his triumph in the scene until the camera pulls back and reveals Bob lashed to the mast of the sail boat, probably against his will. He is probably scared to death and having the time of his life all at the same moment. Have you ever felt like that? That is what I feel like with the start of this blog. It is something I have wanted to do for a long time but something that seems daunting to me if done well and consistently. Consistency, to me seems to be the key, along with simplicity and participation and interesting writing and spell checking and ……See what I mean about daunting. Oh well let’s keep it simple.

Here is the simplest explanation I can give for this blog. I have been using a daily reading guide to keep me disciplined in reading through the scriptures every year. I believe that God spoke to me one morning in Ghana as I was deciding where in the Bible to start reading that day. I had forgotten my bible in my room when I came out and I didn’t want to go back and wake up my roommates. I found a bible in the gathering area of the house where we stayed. In the back of that bible was a very simple reading guide that follows a chronological time line of when the books of the bible were written. It was at that moment that I believe God spoke to me and urged me to commit to reading through the scriptures each year. That was 3 years ago today. I am in Ghana right now writing this first entry of my blog. During the last three years I have encouraged many people to begin this discipline and have given away many reading guides of a very similar nature.

We also use them as a devotional guide during our Outreach Team building sessions and while we are together on the trip. It has been a great unifying feature for our teams because they are all reading and thinking about the same words. In the last 2 years we have had over 250 hundred people participate on a Global outreach Team from my home church, Northview Christian Life Church. All of them have received both the reading guide and the encouragement to make the commitment to reading daily. So, here is my intent for this wonderful technical treasure called the blog:

What it is not is a lot of thoughts about my personal life. I am not really good at that kind of minutia nor do I think that many people would care.

What would like to do is post my thoughts about the daily reading as often as I:

1. Have a thought I consider worth posting

2. Have the time after having the thought to post the thought I thought was worth posting.

What I think would be really cool is for as many of you who read this and who have the reading guide and use it to contribute your thoughts and or comments on my thoughts or what ever else that inspires you to contribute.

If you would like to have one of the reading guides you can email me at doug.ehrgott@nvcl.org