Hi there!
I’m Haley, a Christian wife and mom to four rowdy blessings that we’re raising at the foothills of the North Georgia mountains.
I’ve blogged off and on for 15 years at hobsonhomestead.com, but when I think about what legacy I want to leave, I always circle back to setting a Biblical example for my kids and empowering women to grow in their faith.
Several years ago, I began reading and studying God’s word for myself, not reliant only on spiritual leaders in the church or women’s study books about the Bible.
God convicted me to read His Word for myself daily–direct from the source. And I’ll tell you: that changed everything.
Through this daily discipline of reading the Bible, God has taken what I thought I would gain from reading His word and multiplied it.
I’ve read through the Bible in a year a few times now. I’ve created Bible studies from scratch and I’ve broken Scripture down, verse by verse, to dissect its meaning as I draw close to God and His Word.
Let me tell you how I got into verse mapping.
Several years ago, I read through Jen Wilkin’s Women of the Word for the first time. It’s a short, straightforward book about how to read the Bible, but I’ll tell you that it’s had such an impact on my Christian walk. Since that first read through, I’ve read, referenced or listened to it a few more times, each time pulling out more tips about how to correctly and effectively study the Bible.
Early on in the book, Wilkin tells it like it is. And as much as we don’t like the discomfort of being called out, it also offers us the chance to face our own issues head on so that we can work on correcting them.
Women of the Word unearthed my slanted reading tendencies and showed me a better, more thorough way to approach scripture. It outlined how to study the Bible with purpose, patience, perspective, process and prayer. For me, it was a game changer. I was able to put these tips into practice as I began studying my Bible on my own, not merely relying on a Christian study written for women.
As I was studying my Bible, I would jot down notes and scribbles in my journal with lots of annotations and pointing arrows to connect thoughts when diving deep into certain passages. I would hone in on one verse and dissect its structure, word usage and meaning. Little did I know, I was doing a form of what has now been popularized as “verse mapping.”
Now, others are catching on to this idea of verse mapping and my desire is to help provide other women with tips and resources to help their faith grow as the dive into God’s word.
