Daily Bible Reading | Prayer Challenge

We started reading through the bible a few weeks ago as a family every night before we put the girls to bed. It had been a while since either Alysha or myself had read all the way through the bible, and we thought it would be a good way to prioritize the word of God in our lives. I have to say... I forgot how many names (HARD to try and pronounce names) were in the book of Genesis. I have stuttered and stumbled over most of them and probably still butchered the way they were supposed to be pronounced. You could listen to the harder names and chapters on an audiobook. The readers of the audiobooks don't butcher the names nearly as bad as I do. Amazon has some free bible audiobooks.

From my experience, I would recommend reading or listening to the bible as a family on a daily basis. Our little girls have even started asking us to read the bible to them during the day. This kid's storybook bible is the bible Sawyer is always asking us to read. It is "her bible".

Today we read Genesis chapters 46 and 47. They talk about Jacob traveling to Egypt during the 7-year famine and what happened to the lands of Egypt and Canaan during the famine. The Egyptians and Canaanites gave up all of their money, their livestock, their land, and their freedom to Pharaoh to buy food to survive the famine. By the time the crisis was over, Pharaoh owned all of the money, land, livestock, and servitude of the people.

This made me think about some current events. Somebody always profits during crisis. Somebody always capitalizes on the misfortune of others. We should always be mindful of this fact as we move through our lives. It is one of the primary reasons Alysha and I want to become more self-sufficient and live more independent lives.

I just want to end this post with something we heard in church this Sunday. The preacher was speaking about relationships and gave us a very interesting statistic about divorce. *Full disclaimer: I do not remember the statistic verbatim* but couples are over 90% less likely to get divorced if they pray together every night. Alysha and I have not historically been very good at praying together or even giving our relationship struggles up to God and asking for his help.

We have challenged each other to pray with each other every night and speak to God about giving us direction in life, parenting, and in our relationship. I just want to challenge all of the couples reading this to try and do the same thing. If you've never prayed with your spouse before, it can be hard. It can be awkward, but it has been worth it in our lives. Drop a comment below if you and your spouse want to take us up on our challenge to pray together every night!

~ Mitchell