…digital bible journaling…

Returning to church after a 6 month plague-enforced pause, there were, quite reasonably, a few changes to make it possible to return safely. One of these changes was that pew bibles were removed, and bibles are now a BYO affair. We’d spent a few months doing home church with friends, where I could bring along handwork and keep my hands busy while we watched online church together. Returning to church proper meant I had to put the handwork away and act like a proper, functional adult who can sit for an hour or so without needing to keep their hands busy. Apparently that’s a thing that people can do?

It only took a week or two for me to come up with a compromise – what if, thought I, I screenshot the sermon passage from my bible app, dumped it into procreate, and did some digital journaling as I listened? It worked a charm, and an unexpected side benefit was I could easily add a new layer, and drop my bible study notes in on top, the following Thursday. I could flick back easily to my sermon notes as we talked, I could add and transfer stuff between sermon and bible study, and at the end, I could tuck my pencil back in it’s box, put my iPad to sleep, and all my notes were neatly contained in one folder and I had zero mess to tidy away.

Ideally, I would like to have a digital bible that I could journal in directly, instead of screenshotting and moving to procreate. So far, I’ve only been able to find what I’m after in ESV, but have had no luck with an NIV journalling ebook. I have found a printable in word format, on a book-by-book basis, so I’ve downloaded Luke this morning and edited it to single column, journalling margin format. The PDF is sitting in my dropbox waiting to be loaded onto my iPad, so today’s job is to work on that, and see if it will do what I want it to. I will be sure to report back if I can get it to work, otherwise I’ll just continue to screenshot and save each passage on a seperate page, and my random journalling can continue to go in my hard copy bible. One can never have too many journalling options, right?