Today is Wednesday, July 7, 2010. A couple weeks ago I went to a camp called Snowbird Wilderness Outfitters in Andrews, North Carolina. Snowbird is a Christian camp that my high school youth group, Teens 'n' Truth (TNT), has been involved with for several years. While I was there, I attended various "breakout sessions", where different SWO staff members talked about different topics more in-depth than you would normally hear. For the last few months, I have been feeling really convicted by God to get my spiritual life in order. I haven't been keeping up with my daily reading of the Bible, and when I do read, I don't dig deep into the words to find meaning. So when I attended the breakout session entitled "Studying the Bible", God finally set the wheel in motion for my growth with Him. Spencer, the staff member who led the breakout discussion, told the group that he and his wife have been studying Philippians and 1 Peter respectively, and they have been keeping records of their studies to hand down to their children when they grow up. That idea seemed to click in my mind, so now I am going to try to do the same.
While I was at Snowbird, I started a brief study of the book of Galatians. Now that I'm home and have some free time, I intend to go back through Galatians verse-by-verse, paragraph-by-paragraph, chapter-by-chapter. When I'm done with Galatians, I will continue my studies here, probably moving on to Ephesians, followed by Philippians, etc. Wherever God leads me next, I am looking forward to developing a deeper relationship with Christ, and I hope this will help someone else grow closer to God as well.
Michael Taylor Watanabe
7-7-10
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My original intent for this was to record my studies in a notebook. In order to make this easier to follow (and to keep my own thought processes straight), I will include chapter or paragraph summaries as I progress. To start off with, I will probably do a lot of these as I learn how to effectively study the Bible. And this will also be very important while studying Galatians because Paul's letters are impossible to follow by only going verse-by-verse.
