When I began this blog, it was to keep me on my Bible reading with the help of friends who would stop by to read and comment on what I was reading. It was with the following verse that this was established:

But you, dear friends, must build each other up in your most holy faith, pray in the power of the Holy Spirit, and await the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ, who will bring you eternal life. In this way, you will keep yourselves safe in God’s love. Jude 1:20-21 (NLT)

It has truly been a blessing to write about what I am getting out of the Bible and sharing it with others. And I want to share this blessing with others, but I am a bit stuck. Last night, Carrie was checking out the site and she said, “I love to read it, but I just don’t want to comment.” Without her knowing it, she kind of blew my plan out of the water. But, this was a good thing.

I come to you now. In expanding this site, what do you think would be most helpful to you? Here is what I have come up with so far:

1. Make it a community site, like Facebook or MySpace. You would have a profile and your own blog to join the conversation. This is where I have been leaning, but I am not sure enough people would want to add another profile and password to their lives. Some people just don’t want to write, but they love to read. I totally get it.
2. Make it a magazine site, with others writers other than me to share their observations as we go through the next year reading through the Bible.
3. Keep the way it is.

The bottom line is this:  I feel God is leading me to add more voices and visions from the Word here. The Bible speaks to everybody in different ways to different people. If everybody saw it the same way, we would all go to same church! But we don’t and I love that everybody gets it differently. Let’s discuss, debate and revel in the Word of God. That is the vision for the site and I want to do it in a way that reaches the most people.

So, what do you think? I am ready to start a movement to get everybody reading in 2009 and I want to provide the tools to help everybody continue through the year, but I need your help. Comment below and let me know and let’s see how many people we can get to read the Good News this year. Thanks.

Popularity: 56% [?]

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, I am working on making some changes to the site and as I had experimented with in the past, it moves this blog to another location. If for some reason you get here and this blog has gone away, you can find it at http://matt.mybiblejournal.com. This probably won’t happen for a few days at the earliest, but I just wanted to give you the heads up. Thanks again for checking in.

Popularity: 32% [?]

A blog post, perhaps? I know it has been a while since I got on here. And there is good reason. God has been working on me hardcore and the blog has not been part of His plan. But, now it is. BIG TIME! There are going to be some HUGE changes to this site that are God-sized and I am so excited to get them online. It will come very shortly and I can’t wait to share.

As a very small clue, I share something from my reading today:

Finally, all of you should be of one mind. Sympathize with each other. Love each other as brothers and sisters. Be tenderhearted, and keep a humble attitude. 1 Peter 3:8 (NLT)

I know that is not saying much and I am very sorry for the tease, but I can tell you that more news will come very shortly. Thanks for being there for me.

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As you may have noticed since this post, your feeds have not disappeared and the multi-blog site is nowhere to be found. Thanks to a client emergency and other commitments, I was unable to get the site revised. I was darn close and then, BAM, here came the work. With that being said, I am excited to say that with the Thanksgiving holiday coming this week, I have no commitments for anything: work, volunteering, etc. Nothing, NADA! And I have to say, we are pretty excited in this household.

Don’t get me wrong, we love all that we do and thank God daily for these blessings. But, it is really going to be nice to just hang out at home. So I will be pounding out my projects and I am going to break that up with some cleaning of the home office. You probably thought you would never hear that, but I am pumped to clean and work! I know, I’m sick.

Finally, I will be blogging Revelation. WHOA! I have read the first couple of chapters and I can tell it is going to be a challenge, but well worth the posting. And, I believe that I am going to take my time and finish through the end of the year. I could probably bust it out in a week, but there are several determining factors that have led to this decision:

1. It is a heavy book. I want to do it justice.
2. I want to start Genesis 1 on the first day of the new year.
3. Palm Valley Church is going to be reading the Bible as a church body and I want to take part.
4. Holidays always mess stuff like this up.
5. I want to work on the multi-blog site.

So there you have it, the plan for the rest of the year. As with any plan, I expect that there will be flexibility to it, but I hope it comes off as I have envisioned. As always, thanks for stopping by. Read on…

Popularity: 34% [?]

For those of you that have added myBibleJournal.com to your feed reader (what ever your RSS reader of choice is), this feed may go away this week as I think that I am going to be able to accomplish my goal of having a multi-blog site operational by this week. It is definitely going to be a work in progress, but I think that I can have the first version up and more online Bible journals up shortly.

As for my own writing, I am going to have it at matt.mybiblejournal.com. There is nothing there right now, but I believe that I will have it up tomorrow or Tuesday. Thanks as always for being a part of this journey and keep stopping by.

Popularity: 20% [?]

I have to confess, I have been checking the blog statistics lately, but I haven’t been blogging. The last post was September 19! It came up today when I was telling Greg that I could tell that they checked in from the Catalyst Conference in Atlanta. (ADD note: I really want to go next year!) Anyway, he mentioned the lack of recent posts and he was right. I am totally going on a blogging roll this week. After speaking with a few people at church tonight, I have the desire to get on it and I need to dive into the Word.

I also have to admit that I was bummed on my last post because I thought that it was lost, but guess what, I just discovered that it was saved by WordPress! That is cool.

Finally, I am working on getting the site up as a multi-blog. It is amazing what fellowship can do for you. After talking about the site to my friends today, it was a huge encouragement and I will be getting it up in the next couple of weeks. Thanks for stopping by and I will keep you posted.

Popularity: 19% [?]

I was going through StatCounter.com to check on visitors to the site and a couple of searches were for “How to create a Bible Journal”. If you have visited this site in the past, you know that it is my vision to open up the site to a limitless number of myBibleJournal.com sites that you can have for yourself. Well, the vision is still with me and I am working on it. Needless to say, time has not been on my side.

With that being said, I am putting the pressure on myself. Just as I did when I created this site to get myself to read the Bible, I am now doing the same to get this rolling. I am publishing a deadline. OK, it might be a ballpark deadline, but a deadline nonetheless. So here we go…

I am committing to getting the site up by October 31. I am also working on dabuzz.com at the same time, so that might go up first (I am using that as the test so that the implementation of myBibleJournal is smoother). With that being said, it might come a bit earlier or a bit later, but I will have it up. How’s that for painting myself into a corner!

Finally, I know that there have not been a lot of posts journaling my read. Again, time has not been on my side. When I sit down to journal my reading, I want to give justice to that read, so sometimes it takes me a while. I promise to get back into the swing of things this week. I need to. Anyway, as always, thanks for stopping by and stay classy Bible readers.

Popularity: 9% [?]