Can I just say how much I love calendar alerts? They’re a saving grace in my busy and often over-extended life. This one popped up Tuesday right on time to remind me to do my Philippians review, just as it does every Tuesday night at 8:00pm on the dot.

While I’m grateful for the technology that enables weekly reminders, in all actuality, the calendar alert isn’t the star here. That honor belongs to the event itself.

If you kept up with my earlier posts, you may recall I memorized the book of Philippians last year. I don’t want those nine months of hard work to go to waste, so I review Philippians weekly. That involves me reciting it from memory every Tuesday in order to keep in practice and hopefully move the text into long-term memory. Every other week or so, I read the letter after reciting it to make sure I haven’t forgotten words, phrases, entire verses or scrambled the order of different passages.

Most of the time, I’m excited to review. It takes about 20 minutes if I go straight through without interruption. Since I’m making much slower progress through 1 Peter than I had hoped, going through a completed text encourages me that this is doable. By the grace of God, I can get an entire epistle committed to memory. On Philippians, the work is done, so now I’m just enjoying the fruit. (Brief aside: I don’t mean to imply the only or even the main fruit of memorizing a long passage of Scripture is the satisfaction you feel from having memorized said passage; that’s just one of the benefits, and it’s the one that’s relevant to my discussion at this particular point.) So when the calendar alert pops up, I usually smile and go, “Oh, right! It’s my day to review Philippians. Let’s do this!”

Confession: Tuesday night when the alert popped up, I immediately burst into tears. Continue reading “The Blessing of Ritual” →