Bible reading

One of the things that I'm been working on the past few months is an attempt to try to increase my personal self-discipline. In my case, I don't think that it's so much a matter of the time allocated, but how I subdivide that time. Bible reading - let's just say that I'm somewhat undedicated. Of course, it would be a little silly to say "I suck" without actually making an attempt to patch this up. What I've been trying to do is both to increase availability - as well as increasing structure while trying to avoid the problems of the typical one-year Bible reading plan.

Step 1: Increasing Availability

I'm a student and have stuck with the backpack approach even now that I've begun working towards a doctorate. Basically I was looking for something small enough to carry around but still able to take a beating. What I settled on was this:

The cover looks rather odd - I'd prefer a black edition - but it seemed to have lived up to its claim of being relatively indestructible over the course of a few months of testing. There's also a metal-cased version which would probably be more durable yet, but it's somewhat heavier, looks even more hideous, and I really don't want to deal with metal considering I live in a climate where the outdoor temperature can dip below -30 degrees celcius.

Step 2: More Structure

I'm not a fan of the "one-year bible" approach which has the bible broken up in daily reading chunks (and would require the purchase of yet another Bible).

I decided to adopt the M'Cheyne plan (OT once a year, NT and Psalms twice) with a few tweaks to make it better fit my purposes. In the end I went for a bookmark-based approach which seems to meet a few goals:

1. not spending (much) money: I don't want to buy another Bible specifically for this purposes - I also want something that I can multilate, destroy, or lose without worrying about it. Thus I decided to print my own rather than looking for some pre-made thing.
2. durable: Typical paper isn't know for being durable, and I also wanted the ability to mutilate the thing (see the next point) so laminating also wasn't an option. Thus I went for parchment paper - it's roughly 3 times the thickness of regular paper and thus reasonably durable. Yet a lot of consumer-level printers - including mine - are capable of printing on this stuff (check the documentation - mine requires that I feed through the manual feed slot to use this stuff). It's also relatively cheap - roughly 10 cents per letter-sized sheet of paper in an assortment of colours. For some odd reason the (small) office-supply store in a nearby store didn't stock this, but Walmart did.
3. Graceful degradation: The primary weak-point of the one-year program, I think, is its optimism. It forgets that at some point during the year you'll likely mess up and miss reading for some reason or other (or will only have sufficient time to do a fraction of the day's reading). Once you've missed a day or two if becomes rather difficult to play catch-up.

   One of the reasons that I wanted a combination of cheap but durable while modifiable, is for the ability to check off what I've actually read through. Thus when time is short I can opt for the one or two chapters a day instead of the normal M'Cheyne four - simply following one or more rather than all four of the paths. Rather than getting stuck with the option of either losing my place and forgetting what I did or reading chapters in an odd order, I then have the option of dropping a few of the pathways. I can then continue to read linearly where I'm still able, and separately playing catch-up on the other four paths (reading linearly in each one, rather than flipping back and forth all the time).

Now to see how well this will work in practice.

If you're interested in seeing whether this system works in your case, here's the document that I whipped up in both PDF and OpenDocument formats. (If you don't have a reader capable of reading the latter file format then download OpenOffice for free.