Memorizing in my mid-50s

 I've always had a thing for memorizing Scripture. I guess it came easy and I got kudos for it and so I wanted to do it again. It started as a young child and it just kept going in spurts and starts and stops. 

I remember when my dad decided that memorizing Scripture would be a good punishment for us boys. Arguing with your brother? Memorize Philippians 1:1. Didn't clean your room? Memorize 1:2 Didn't do your chores? Now you've got 1:3. It didn't take long before I had multiple chapters of the book of Philippians, but I'll confess it took me a while to get over that. The basic message was that memorizing Scripture was a punishment and it kind of left a bad taste in my mouth. I recommend against this approach.

On the other hand, I recommend doing just about anything to get children to memorize Scripture. It's so easy when they are young and it sticks with them. And so often a little praise is enough to motivate them to go on...

Parents and preschoolers and elementary students and middle schoolers and high schoolers, take note!

But then I got to college and made a friend named Joel on my hall. We both felt like we wanted to be more active in our prayer life and originally just decided that each evening one or the other of us would go to the other's room and we would spend 30 minutes in prayer. Then we decided we were going to start memorizing Scripture together and we found it went really fast. At that point in our young minds we could add 2-3 verses per evening and it worked great until REVIEW shot the floor out from under our feet. We were spending nearly 2 hours each evening on review and adding new verses and at some point the whole motivation thing just kind of crumbled under us.

But 10-15 more chapters got put in mental storage during that phase. It was perhaps my most fruitful time of Scripture memorization in my life. 

College student or singles? Take note!

Years later I was responsible for discipleship first for some young college students and then for some middle school students. I decided to use my programming skills to come up with a system that would solve the review issue. So by-heart.org was born. It does a good job of dividing up the verses between every xth day so you don't have to do an inordinate amount on any given day. I had nearly 100 students of various ages (and some adults - parents who liked the idea) memorize quite a bit of Scripture using this tool. But you have to keep after it and I fizzled again.

On a family road trip where we were jammed together in the van for hours on end for a couple weeks my wife challenged us to learn 1 Peter. Some of it we did together and some of it people split off and worked on their own. I'm not sure if anybody made it through the whole book, but it was certainly valuable.

Families? Take note!

So when my son challenged me in my mid-50s to challenge Hebrews I was up for the challenge. I realized it was going to be hard (hah! little did I know!) but it was doable. First I tried using by-heart.org but eventually I realized that part of what worked for me was verbally repeating the verses. So I went back to the system that my son had challenged me with - a system by Andy Davis that involves reviewing a verse on a daily basis for 100 days. But then (here's the key!) you "Kiss the book good-bye". Rather than trying to keep everything you've memorized in your active memory you let it go. You can periodically go back and review if you want, but the point is that you keep going forward with new verses rather than getting bogged down in reviewing for longer and longer periods until you give up.

Unfortunately Andy Davis's method of actual "mental storage" doesn't work for this now-55-year-old. When I do the repetition as he specifies it I am just NOT getting the verses. So this is what I do...

(1) Start by repeating the new verse and read/say it over and over until I can comfortably say it without looking. This may be 5-6 times if it's a short verse, but if it's a longer verse I may have to "chunk it" and repeat it 20 or even 30 times.

(2) Go back to yesterday's verses and read/say it over and over until I can comfortably say it without looking.

(3) Now combine yesterday's verse and today's verse and read/say it over and over again until I can say both of them without looking.

(4) Depending on whether I feel like I am getting shaky on the larger current passage I may go back to the verse I learned the day before yesterday and add it in until I can say all 3 of them without looking.

(5) Now go back and review everything that I haven't already reviewed 100 times, just like Andy Davis says.

(6) When I get toward the end I recognize that I'm going to be prompting myself by looking (or if someone is kind enough to help me out that helps a GREAT deal) but I want to get to the end. 

(7) I find that often I know the verse once I am prompted with the first word or two, but the connection between verses is where I struggle. So if I noticed that I was struggling with one of those connection points between verses I will go back and try to find something in the content or some memorization trick to connect one verse with the 2nd.

(8) Then at the very end I make sure that as I leave I can say at least yesterday's verse and today's verse without looking. To do this I typically have to repeat them again more times than I like to think about. 

Sigh... Such is life when you're 55... But I'm partway through chapter 9 and still making headway, so it's not a lost cause.

My son is into chapter 10 and he can review the whole thing in about 30 minutes. My somewhat stumbling mid-50s review takes closer to 40 minutes, but what a worthwhile expenditure of time!

Mid-lifers? Take note!

I can't speak to the next decade because I haven't been there yet. But I'm guessing that especially if you've worked at memorization along the way you will find that it's still possible. And I'm further guessing that the more you work at it the better your memory will be, whether that's for Scripture or for other things - that's a win-win!

Seniors? Take note!

I could be wrong, but it sounds to me like all of us at every age and stage are supposed to take note. So here's the question for you - why are you still sitting here reading this blog when you could be memorizing Scripture?