I’ve written before that I started to read the scriptures on my own at age seventeen, but I haven’t told how it came about.
In my family, we read the scriptures every day after dinner. Everybody had a copy of the scriptures to follow along and read from. We all took turns reading. When I say we read scriptures after dinner, I mean that we could not leave the table and go anywhere until we read. Essentially we were stuck at the table until we got through a chapter. Through most of my teenage years, this was my main exposure. I might read for seminary as required, but I didn’t really keep it up during the summer.
My mom was my seminary teacher during high school, and the summer before my senior year I decided I would get a head start on the seminary reading material. We would be going through the New Testmament. That’s when I started reading the scriptures on my own because I wanted to and not because I was required for anything.
This was when my testimony began to sprout.
I would read my scriptures at night while lying in bed, just before I went to sleep and I began to notice some interesting blessings. The nights that I read, the next day seemed to go smoother. The nights that I forgot or was too tired to read, the next day felt kinda rough. I suspect that the days went smoothly when I read the scriptures the night before, because when I was confronted with a challenge or a temptation, I was more easily able to do what the Lord would want me to do, having put myself more under His influence and having those principles from the scriptures closer to the conscious surface of my mind than they would be otherwise. I was more at peace with myself and more intent on keeping the peace between myself and others (like difficult younger siblings, of which I had six).
How did you begin reading the scriptures on your own? What blessings have you noticed from it?
(Image credit – “Daniel and Karleigh and Jadon” blog, http://hobartfrankfurter.blogspot.com/2007/07/scripture-study.html)
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