Buddy Studying

I might have hit on this topic at least once before, but I am going to really delve into what my mind has been processing in the past couple days. This was all started by the book that I recently finished The Year Living Biblically. Yeah, I messed up the title the last time that I wrote about it. I hope that if you were looking for it, that this didn't hinder you. But the idea was about religion and the importance of actually experiencing it with others. I believe that he, AJ Jacobs, said that its "not something that you do alone". I am sort of modifying that in a way that I have found true and saying that its something that you don't do SOLELY alone.

I approach this with a couple examples. The first is my primary study that I am doing right now. I am doing an email study with a friend, where we email our thoughts, what we feel God is telling us, and just basically anything that we feel we should share. If you don't have some one who you can meet regularly, I highly recommend this. And even if you can see some one on a weekly or bi-weekly basis, I still might do this for the in between time. The reason is because it makes you accountable to some one. If you don't read or you aren't sharing, you feel like you are letting the other down. While its not something to guilt you into studying, it helps keep you motivated. I believe that I have made that exact point before. We are lazy. If left up to our own desires, we probably wouldn't read all that much. Its part discipline and part desire when you are studying a passage or book. If you have no feedback or no real interaction, you are quicker to become discouraged and wonder why you are doing it. I guess I think of it as a road trip. Short little road trips alone can be quite fun. But, when you are on a long, cross-country type thing, you get lonely if you don't have any interaction. You get sleepy, you lose focus and have less of a desire to enjoy the journey. When you have some one else or other people, you can talk about the things that you notice along the way. You can interact with others about what they see, but you might have missed. It becomes less a task and more of an adventure. As a guy, the whole idea of a adventure appeals to me more.

The reason that I say that its not something that you do solely on you own is because there are times when you do need to take a break from others and reflect on what you have read or what you are being told. There are things that you learn that are completely for you and not for anyone else. You might share them with others, but you also might just let them strengthen you in times or need. Also, we are all called to experience a close personal relationship with God. Something that is very intimate and has to be explored by ourselves at times. The good thing is that most of the time we get so enthused or amazed by what we experience, we share those things and others are encouraged or challenged (in a good way).

Alright, I realize that this is all a bit easy to understand. However, when I read that idea in the book, I just sort of felt the need to get my thoughts out about it. It might never really change how others experience or do a study. I might even just be repeating myself from previous posts.

While I have enjoyed the book, I was taken back by the author's assertion at the end. I guess I didn't fully expect him to surrender to God and all that, but I sort of hoped he would. There were a couple times that it seemed that he was willing, but he never could rationalize it. I think that was the problem. He came to the "experiment" with an idea that he was going to do these rules and see what happened. But he never fully allowed himself to think that what he is reading or thinking could be true. He was always a skeptic. While I definitely don't agree with his conclusion or with a lot of his assumptions, I definitely recommend reading it. As I have mentioned before, it challenged me in areas that I hadn't thought of before. It left an impression.