First Place

My new resolve to memorize scripture did not just appear out of no-where. The seed was planted and watered over my lifetime by various sources.

• My mom memorized a lot of scripture when she first made the decision to follow Christ and she tried to get me involved too.
• My Sunday school would practise a verse every week. I loved when we would say it together as a group and then the teacher would cover up a word at a time progressively until the whole verse was blocked out.
• I went to a Christian school during my high school years that required the students to memorize a passage of scripture every month of the school year and later I practised with my children when their school did the same thing.
• Most recently, however, I got involved with a nutrition/bible study group called First Place that had 9 commitments and one of them was memorizing a scripture verse a week.

I no longer physically teach/attend a First Place group but I have continued working through their bible study books because they are very practical and insightful.

As I've said before, in the past I have believed that I don't have a good memory and I struggled quite a bit with memory work. Just memorizing one verse has been overwhelming to me. It seemed like the words wouldn't stick in my head and I'd end up making a mess of it.

One thing I liked about First Place is that they included a CD with every bible study book that coupled each memory verse with music. They weren't popular songs and they were very repetitive, but my daughter & I liked singing along and we did a great job of memorizing that way.
Even then, I wasn't faithful to memorizing every verse every week. I was faithful to the bible studies though and it seems the continuous reminding that scripture memory is vital to Christian growth has finally taken hold in my heart.