I’ve been waiting to blog about this because I wanted to see if it took root. Heres’ the deal:

I’m extremely undisciplined, especially when it comes to reading the Bible, and praying with a devoted mind, body and spirit. I’ve tried many times to change – to become a different kind of man. I’ve blocked out the time in my calendar, I’ve set the alarm for 6AM, I’ve asked for accountability, I’ve used a Bible reading plan. I’ve done all these things and more, but I always quit. I always fail. The new practice never takes root.

About 6 weeks ago I was discussing web design and how I think it’s smart to redesign websites in small increments. So instead of spending loads of time and money working on a complete overhaul, we should be looking for small problems and tackling them one at a time. Spend some time on the jacked-up navigation. Once that’s looking good, maybe work on displaying the search results in a more scannable format and so on. Then it dawned on me – why I never seem to change. The plan for change is always drastic. I’m not looking to just read by Bible more often. I’m planning on reading it every day without exception from 5:30-6:30AM. I’m planning on hand-writing my prayers in a journal and making sure I pray for myself, my family, my extended family, my friends, my co-workers, and whatever else a holy, disciplined man prays for in the wee ours of the morning. I’m trying to do a complete overhaul on my devotional life in a week.

So I asked myself – how can I just slip prayer and bible-reading into my life? Well – I’m going to need someone to remind me, because I’ll get busy and forget. It also cant require me to get up early, since that’s another new-behavior and hard one to make a habit of. Here’s what I did:

1. Accountability partners have totally failed me in the past because they typically suck just as bad as I do at being disciplined. And if they don’t, they’re not going to call me everyday to ask if I’ve read my bible. I know I wouldn’t.

I use backpack for personal organization and to-do lists and stuff. It has a nifty feature where it will email (and even text-message) reminders. I set an email reminder that gets sent to me everyday at 11AM. All it says is “Stop what you’re doing, read your bible for 5 minutes and pray for your family.” I typically don’t have anything going right at 11AM so it’s a great time to stop whatever it is I’m doing. If I am in a meeting or something, I have reminder in my inbox when I get back to my desk. This means that in order to get through my day without reading the Bible, I have to ignore the reminder. I have to make a conscious decision not to meet with God. I won’t pretend it never happens, but it’s rare.

2. Prayer seems like kind of tricky thing. I work in an open studio with several other people. Praying outloud isn’t an option and journaling – well, that’s another new behavior and therefore not a viable part of the plan.

I use gmail and I love it. I know – it’s weird to love an email program, just humor me a minute. I send lots of emails everyday. Why not just email my prayer as a form of journaling? Since I don’t have Jesus’ email address, I’ve been sending the prayers to my wife. At first, I just thought she’d find them encouraging. The blessing has been two-fold. Not only does it occasionally spark God-centered dialogue between us, but it acts as buit-in accountability. The first week I started emailing my prayers, I got lazy toward the end of the week. Because she’s encourage y the emails, and because she loves me, Kristin emailed me late in the afternoon asking if I’d spent time in the Word that day. She hadn’t received the email and was wondering how I was doing!

Since Gmail has such a great tagging feature, I just label all of those sent messages as “prayer.” All I have to do is click on that label and I’ve got my own personal online prayer journal. Huzzah!

3. As for the actual reading – I’d be lost without Margie Haack’s Read through the Bible Program for Shirkers and Slackers (p. 5-6 of the PDF). She goes into great detail about where it came from, but what’s important is that it’s broken up simply by days of the week and not my scheduled dates. There is no way to get behind. The benefit is that when I feel like skipping because I’m not sure what to read, it has some very specific recommendations.