Thanks to the Christmas gift of the ESV Reader’s Bible (the single-volume one), it looks like I will be embarking on a new reading plan in 2019.

For 2017, I used the 5 Day plan and really enjoyed it. My favourite aspects of this were: - starting each quarter by reading through one of the Gospels - Reading through the Psalms, Proverbs and prophets within their contexts within the historical books - The flexibility of being able to catch up on weekends when the week was crazy (like the week I spent in Orlando going through a missions assessment)

For whatever reason, I decided that I wanted to try a different reading plan in 2018 so this past year I have used the classic plan that was put together by Robert Murray M’Cheyne. After completing it (sort of, I still have 3 days left), I have a lot of thoughts on it. I did enjoy reading through the New Testament twice in one year. Having the Old Testament stretched across the whole year has also been helpful.

My one complaint is that because the prophets are all read straight through, I found that I had to rely on previous times reading through them in order to get an idea of context. I much preferred reading Isaiah in chunks alongside 2 Kings and Chronicles.

Now that I’ve got this new Bible, I considered trying the reading plan for readers but the amount of reading that I have to do for the next module in my counselling course has made it a practical impossibility. I hope to make use of the plan after my course is complete, but for 2019, I’ll be trying Joe Carter’s plan to change my mind.

I’ve got some more reading stuff that will be happening next year and I’ll be sharing about it soon, but for today, I am glad that I have the most important part of my reading life in 2019 planned out.