May you live in interesting times, they say. As for me, it has been sixty-eight years of interesting times, personally, nationally, and in the church. One of the most important factors in my keeping my head together is having read through the entire Bible each year for the past forty some odd years. I recommend it wholeheartedly.

I got connected with the Navigators while in Army flight school. I thank God for the Navigators and the impact they had on my life. Among other things, they browbeat and otherwise encouraged me to begin the discipline of reading through the Bible each year. I used a couple of different reading plans during my time in service, cutting them up so I could use them as bookmarks.

The November 1983 Navigator Discipleship Journal introduced me to the Bible reading plan that I have used ever since. The date markings appear in the margins of every Bible I have used for any length of time.

The heart of the DJBRP, as it is affectionately known, is a division of the Bible into four sequences, the Old Testament wisdom literature, the gospels, the rest of the Old Testament, and the rest of the New Testament. That means I am reading from the gospels and from the wisdom books (Psalms, Proverbs and so on) every day, and that the heavy-slogging books like Leviticus get broken down into reasonable chunks.

The stroke of genius, however, was basing the reading plan on a twenty-five day month. Nobody manages to read every single day. So if your reading plan simple assigns a passage or passages to each day of the year, you are constantly playing catch-up, which gets really discouraging really fast. With the twenty-five day month, the catch-up days are built in. If you finish early you can use the extra days to look at other passages or to nap.

The Discipleship Journal Bible Reading Plan does not "work". No Bible reading plan "works", just like no exercise plan "works". They don’t work; you do. The Bible reading or exercise plan will happily lie there doing you absolutely no good until you pick it up and begin reading or exercising. There is no bad time to start. Start where you are, and keep at it. I am certainly glad that I did.