My memorizing journey started out with a bang and ended with a whimper. I started memorizing every day of the week but went down to 5 days a week after a few months. At the time I was in school and reading the Bible for devotions every day, but found the time for working on memorization 45 minutes a day.
During that 45 minutes I spent about 5 minutes memorizing one verse a day and 35 to 40 minutes in what I call recover study. Recover study is going over 90 past memorized verses and refreshing myself so that I didn't forget what I already put to memory. I explain this all in a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJtG3nsjeWQ
Out of school I added to my Bible study. I was teaching myself Biblical Hebrew, reading the Bible and reading books about the Bible - every day. Years later, I cut down on memorizing to 4 days a week and then 3. By the time I had 20 years in, I was burning out and felt like I needed to cut back on something. I had memorized most of the New Testament books I wanted to and a few Psalms, so to keep my sanity, I quit memorizing but continued with all my other studies which at that time included preparing for sermons.
The memorizing helped me a lot through the years in my ministry. I quoted verses in sermons, and also found that memorizing had helped me to remember and find passages I wanted to use in life and in sermons.
Ten years later I stepped out of being a pastor for a short time (it turned out to be much longer than I planned) and I taught in several local Christian universities. But years without working on recovering scripture, while teaching in local universities, I began getting a bit sloppy in quoting the Bible. When students asked questions about any topic, I had chapters and verses (in their own proper context) to help support whatever answer I gave (of course I only quoted a verse or two - not a whole chapter). But those quotes began to get sloppy and I would forget what followed the verse I was quoting. I found myself paraphrasing more and more and quoting word for word less and less.
That's what happens when you no longer keep up with what you memorized; when you no longer recover scripture put to memory. And so after 10 more years of paraphrasing and being sloppy, I decided to go back to those books I had memorized, work through them again, get updated, memorize again if needed, test myself, push myself to be accurate word for word again. I returned to my recovery process.
LESSON LEARNED
Years ago, I pushed myself to memorize a good portion of the New Testament, and when I had enough, I quit. For some reason, it didn't enter my mind until lately, that I didn't have to quit entirely. At the time I quit I had a regimen of memorizing one verse a day which only took a few minutes. However, it took me up to 40 minutes a day to cover past books I had already memorized, which meant working through and testing myself on 90 verses a day on verses I had put to memory.
For some reason it was all or nothing for me - it hadn't occurred to me that I could stop memorizing verses and cut recovery time in half or less. It wouldn't be as good as a whole 40 minutes, but it would have helped a lot and helped me to quote better.
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