Tuesdays are deadlift day, which I view with equal parts dread and anticipation. Your blood pressure spikes during the lift and sometimes you feel like you will pass out. I often tear bits of skin off my hands and the bar bears blood stains from dragging across my shins. Looming behind all this is the distinct possibility that a moment of poor form could mean back pain for the rest of my life. There’s always a moment of decision as I approach the bar. Do I really want to do this?
Today in between sets I am finalizing my memorization of Philemon and the last few chapters of Romans. Between Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 Thessalonians, Romans and Philemon I now have 36 chapters committed to memory. It would take about two and a half hours to recite everything, and the amount of time reviewing past material is only increasing as I press onward. So I ask myself: Do I really want to do this?
You could point out that there is little need for most people, especially pastors like me, to be physically strong. Manual labor jobs are increasingly automated and we all have friends we can call to help move that sleeper sofa. Memorization feels even more dated and redundant. Don’t we have any scripture, or anything else we could want to know, right in our pockets at all times?
Many Christians view fitness and memorization with the same vague sense of guilt, as things we probably should be doing but definitely aren’t.
For me this started a little more than two years ago when my mom died and I began exercising as a way of working through the grief. By the start of 2017 I had progressed to a serious weightlifting program in my steadily growing home gym. Around that time I was convicted by a simple thought: where was my devotion to my spiritual growth? I never missed a workout, but like many pastors my devotional life was prone to irregularity. I looked back with longing on my first years in faith, when I would spend hours reading Scripture, then filling notebooks paraphrasing it to fix it in my mind better. I set out to memorize the book of Ephesians as a way to better grasp the text and just to see if I could do it.
Progress in both fitness and memorization is a slow, plodding thing. The real success is establishing consistent patterns that bear fruit over time.
We’ve all got time issues. I’ve got two young kids and work a side job to supplement my income from the church. I have an understanding with my wife that my time lifting is my release from stress. There’s no church politics, no complicated decisions. You just put weight on the bar. Pick it up. Put it down. Add more weight. Repeat.
My son, at a year and a half old, has helped with the memorization by waking up every morning before 6. Before I let myself scroll mindlessly through news feeds I spend a good half hour or so working on the verses for the day. In the morning my goal is to recite the new paragraph from memory. By lunch I’ve forgotten it, but with a few minutes review I’m able to do the same again. During bath time with the kids I review the past chapter or two then the new material. I review in between lifting sets and often when driving instead of listening to the radio. Sometimes I need to go back and rework chapters if I go more than two weeks without review, but the first passages I memorized in Ephesians are lasting longer and longer without degrading.
Besides repetition, there are a variety of memory tricks I use to help. I only practice out of an ESV app on my phone so that the image of the paragraph and each word’s position is the same every time. I move my lips or sub-vocalize when I review to involve muscle movements. I always recite with the same cadence, especially when verses lend themselves to a sort of beat. With Romans 16 I have created a mental village with specific images tied to the nature of each name (ie Andronicus looks robotic). Be prepared for setbacks. I went a few weeks without practicing Ephesians and was horrified to find that I could no longer summon it from memory. Fortunately reworking it was much faster; the words were still there and within a week of light review I had it again.
It may be that I have an edge and was born with exceptional memory abilities. There are certainly some weight lifters who inherited good genetics and have a higher ceiling than others, but that only shows up at a competitive level. Anyone who puts in regular time with a good program will see results. I suspect memorization is much the same. After all, how many millions of Muslims have memorized the Quran?
Once the pattern is established the results provide the motivation to continue. I enjoy the changes in my body now, but my real goal is to continue serving God in good health well into my 80’s. The physical benefits pale in comparison to the familiarity of scripture gained by memorizing every word. I have taken classes on these books, taught out of them countless times, and could even paraphrase most of Romans. Yet as you work through passages like this they dominate your thoughts continually (not gonna lie, the weeks spent on Romans 1-3 were kind of depressing).
There are some occasions where it is helpful to share with someone else a chapter from memory as encouragement, but this is not training for a performance. What can compare to the ability to mentally scroll through every mention of thankfulness in Colossians? These passages spring to my mind unbidden throughout the day and I long to possess the rest of them. God willing I will press on to the rest of the New Testament and continue into the Old Testament.
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