Hello again. I'm Cindy Young, and this is Primarily Scripture. Today we're finishing up my series called The Power of the Pencil. Now, I began this series way back in April, and I intended to take a break after that for May and June because life was so crazy- I was looking at my calendar thinking there's no way I can keep doing Primarily Scripture while life is that busy. So I intended to take that break, but I never got to tell you about it because at the end of April, I got pretty sick and I lost my voice, so I wasn't even able to finish my April series. So today, even though we're at the end of June, we're going to finish up The Power of the Pencil, and then we'll be able to dive into July. We've talked about different ways that your pencil can be helpful as you study. And by pencil, I mean highlighters, colored pencils, scripture marking tools of any kind. And we can use these for underlining, highlighting, circling, writing annotations, which are small notes in the margins, or keeping track at the top of your page of specific events that we will find on those different pages. I promised you that the next thing we were gonna talk about is journaling, and there are two different ways that we're gonna talk about journaling today. So the first one is a technique that I recommend if you are not sure how to journal. If you're intimidated by the thought of scripture journaling, then I want you to use this technique. Try it out and see what it does for you, okay? You can use any journal you want, doesn't matter. in fact, it could be a piece of paper that you just write on. I would hope that you would have some place to keep your papers so in the future you can go back and look at them. One of the reasons we journal is so that we can remember what we had learned. Even if you do decide to throw away or recycle your paper after you write on it, writing down in the moment will still help you to have a stronger spiritual experience and a stronger connection, and to be able to remember better what you learned. This easy technique involves writing down one thought for every verse that you read. Every single verse has something that you can learn from it, and some people go, "Really? Every verse?" Yes, every single verse. Now, some verses are harder than others to find those little nuggets of wisdom and doctrine and truth. But it does get easier to find them the more you practice. Let's look in 1 Kings chapter nine, in the Old Testament and we'll give it a shot together, okay? So verse one of chapter nine says this, "And it came to pass when Solomon had finished the building of the house of the Lord, and the king's house, and all Solomon's desire, which he was pleased to do." Okay, that's verse one. What would we write down? Anything come to mind? I love that it says Solomon finished building the house of the Lord. He finished building the temple. Solomon's temple was very, very famous. So do you have one thought about the temple or about Solomon? You could just simply write down what the verse is about if you wanted to. If you feel like you don't have any special insights, that's fine. Just write down what's happening. Solomon finished building the temple. Or you could write down a thought that you have, about the temple. I love the house of the Lord, or I have a goal to be in the temple someday. Anything that you read in this verse is fair game for you to write in your journal. There's no wrong way to journal, which is wonderful. Okay, let's look at verse two. So verse one says, "After he finished building," verse two says, "That the Lord appeared to Solomon the second time, as he had appeared unto him at Gibeon." Okay. What would we write for that? You can either go back and find the chapter, and I think it's chapter three where the Lord appears to Solomon at Gibeon, and that was in a dream that the Lord appeared to him. So this is saying that he did it the same way. So you can either make a note about that, about what's happening, or you can write down your feelings. What I would probably write in my journal for this verse is just simply,"Wow, the Lord appeared to him." Isn't that fantastic? Now, I have had inspiration and I have felt like the Lord was guiding me and directing me, but I have never seen the Lord in a dream, and the Lord actually appeared to Solomon in a dream. Writing in your journal just the word wow is enough. So it could be something short like wow, or it could be something long. Let's go on to verse three."And the Lord said unto him, 'I have heard thy prayer and thy supplication that thou hast made before me. I have hallowed this house which thou hast built to put my name there forever, and mine eyes and mine heart shall be there perpetually." So what would you write in your journal for this verse? Like I said before, you could write what is going on and you're creating this narrative of what's happening. The Lord says, "I've heard your prayer, the house is holy, and my name will be there." And that's great to be sure that you're getting the understanding. But we could take it to the next level and write down our thoughts and our feelings about the principles that are contained in this verse. So what happened in this verse? The Lord heard his prayer. You could write down a thought about how the Lord hears prayers. This teaches me that God listens and hears us when we pray, or this teaches me that the Lord makes His temple holy. The temple isn't holy because it's been built beautifully. It's not holy because of the people who built it or even the people who are inside, although we try to maintain strict standards of worthiness so that we don't detract from the holiness of the house. But the holiness comes from the Lord because He has hallowed it and made it holy. And so I might write that in my journal. Do you see how each verse, if we just go one verse at a time and write anything down, that could help us study? Now, I do this a little bit on the free worksheets that I put out every week, except when I'm on a break. I didn't put any worksheets out those weeks. Sorry about that. But, but if you look on the second page of my worksheets that are out this week, you can see that in almost every verse, I write a question or a thought on the side in the margin and give you a chance to ponder it and think about it. You are doing the same thing when you journal verse by verse. It can be a question. It can be a thought. It can be an explanation of the story. Anything you want. And if you're intimidated by journaling, this is a fabulous place to start. Okay, the second way to journal that we're going to talk about is free writing. So while going through the verses one at a time is journaling as you're studying, free writing I would recommend you do at the end of your scripture study. So read your chapter, read your selection, whatever it is you have decided to read for the day, do some pondering as you study, and then pull out your journal. And there are two ways you can do this, you can choose to either set a timer and say, "I'm gonna write for three whole minutes, and I'm not gonna stop until the timer goes off." Or you can just let the thoughts flow to you. When you first start journaling like this, you might feel like it's, like nothing's happening. And so one way to get over that awkwardness of, "Okay, what am I gonna do? What am I gonna write?" Is to set a timer and just write anything that comes to mind for a short amount of time. Two minutes, three minutes, something really short. You can start writing down all the same kinds of things that you did when you went one verse at a time, or you can focus on the overall picture. Today I learned about David and Goliath. Or I learned about Solomon building his temple. And my thoughts about the temple are, and you can just kind of split off and start writing about that thing. For instance, "I read that Solomon built his temple. I've been to the temple, and this is how I feel when I go to the temple," or, "These are my goals to get to the temple." Anything like that is great. As you go, periodically pause and ask the Lord, "What am I supposed to be learning today?" Which is so great. If you don't think you know what to journal about, ask the Lord, and then stop and listen and ponder and see where your pencil takes you. I have had a lot of answers come this way, and I've had a lot of insights come to me about the scriptures that I did not get while I was reading the verses, but it did come to me while I was journaling about those verses and principles afterwards. So before you put your pencil away, say a prayer and ask the Lord, "Is there anything else that I'm supposed to learn today? Anything else?" And pause and ponder and try writing again, and see what else comes to you. And then ask again, and do it over and over again, as many times as it takes to get all of the messages that the Lord has for you that day When I do this, sometimes I only get one or two thoughts. But other times I will get six, eight, 10 thoughts to write down, things that the Spirit is helping me to learn. A word from the verses will come to my mind and then that leads me to think about something else, which leads me to something else, which leads me to think about something else, which leads me to make a plan of action in my own life of something I need to be doing more, or doing less, or working on. And it's a wonderful way to receive inspiration and guidance through the scriptures. The inspiration that will come to you through the scriptures won't always come through the words that you're reading. Sometimes they come through the words that the Lord puts into your heart. And this is one amazing way to capture those words. So I definitely recommend that you try scripture journaling. Now, like I said, you can use any old piece of paper or notebook for your journal, but you can also make it a fancy journal if you want. There are young women in my ward who love to do what they call junk journaling. And what that is, is besides just writing down what happened and their thoughts and feelings, is they put in pictures and drawings and stickers and ribbons and washi tape, and they just make these beautiful pages of all sorts of stuff. And often the papers are overlapping each other. They have strips of paper that they've glued in, pictures from their time with friends that they glue into their journal, anything like that. So if you wanted to be creative with your scripture journal, that is good too, and it's a really fun way to record your thoughts and feelings. You can pull out your favorite phrases, your favorite verses, find a general conference talk that matches up with it, write down how you felt, and how it's relevant to your own life. But the wonderful thing is there is no wrong way to journal because it's just a record of your own thoughts and your own interactions with the scriptures and the Holy Ghost, and how the Lord is teaching you line upon line. I have found that my scripture study is vastly improved when I journal along with reading. So I hope that this week you will give it a try. Thanks so much for being here. I'm Cindy Young, and I'll see you next time right here on Primarily Scripture. Thanks for tuning in to Primarily Scripture with Cindy Young. Don't forget, you can subscribe to the newsletter and download free worksheets on the website primarilyscripture.com. And if you like the channel, be sure to subscribe, like, share, and leave a review. See you next time!