Memory Monday

Joanne Heim at The Simple Wife has started something new, Memory Monday. She is the author of the book Living Simply, an absolute gem. I am leisurely reading through it, treasuring each minute even though I will probably re-read it as soon as I am finished, all the while whipping through fiction after fiction after fiction. I refuse to read this book when I am drifting off to sleep because I don't want to miss a thing! (Just as a little side note: being a math brain, I don't do so well with reading comprehension unless I read something a second time...then it seems to sink in a little more permanently.)

So about Memory Monday — Joanne started this to provide accountability and motivation for herself in memorizing God's word and writing it on her heart, and she's invited us along. Each Monday we will type our verse or passage out by memory that we've memorized in the past week. I'm so fantastic at paraphrasing and knowing the content of a verse, but not the actual word-for-word verse or the specific scripture reference. I freely use my concordance or my husband to find verses, not always in that order. I'm reminded that there are countries in this world that are not allowed to have Bibles for fear of persecution, or don't have enough for everyone to have one. They will cut one up and share it, carrying that paper around, treasuring it and memorizing it, until trading it for a different one. Those people know what it means to hide God's word in their heart. I am spoiled by convenience. I, too, have been convicted recently about this same thing, and I am so privileged to participate in Memory Monday.

The verse I picked for this week is one of my favorites, and when I learned it at the beginning of the century (isn't is so much fun to say that?) I learned it in a different version than the one I'm going to share here (all mine will be NIV here), then got it mixed up with another one soon after (probably NIV at that point), and another version confused me sometime later. And for some reason I could never remember exactly what verse number it was: five or eight. So I decided it was a good one for me to start with. Being a perfectionist, I even tried to remember where the punctuation was, but that's where I might get it goofed up. By memory:

Philippians 4:8
"Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things."

If you want to read Joanne's explanation about Memory Monday, you can go here, and she has a button you can pick up if you want to participate. And to see what Joanne and others memorized this week, here's the link for that. While you're there, look around her blog. I think you'll be glad you did.