Welcome to the Transformation!

Welcome to the BOOK Club blog!  We hope you will find this a helpful site . . . providing a place for you to share your thoughts and ideas concerning your daily Bible reading.  It's exciting to think of where this blog might take us as we aim to live a life pleasing to God.  For anyone who loves to write their thoughts and get feedback, this is the place for you to be!  May you be an encouragement.  May you be encouraged.

For our opening post, I want to share something with all of you that has happened to me since joining the BOOK Club.  Initially, I wasn't too sure what to expect when I signed up to join the Club.  However, after my first meeting last fall, I knew that the group was going to be a great benefit to me--spiritually, intellectually and socially.  I also soon realized that the BOOK Club is a place of accountability.  All of these factors combined have influenced my spiritual walk.  However, the most impactful experience for me has been opening The Word of God and reading it; and then, not just reading it, but applying what I've read as it relates to my own life.

I work in a school as an Educational Associate, and I have the opportunity to spend 30 minutes a day with a group of grade 3 and 4 students in a program called Guided Reading.  This term we are studying a reading strategy called Synthesizing, which can be summed up as "transformation"; Transforming what is read and thinking about how it can be taken one step further and applied to our own lives.  It is putting all the pieces together to see them in a new way.  As I have been preparing my lessons for the students, I've been reminded of how transforming God's Word really is.  How has what you've read in your daily Bible reading changed you?  I believe that transformation will happen to every person who reads God's word and applies it to their own life.  Of course, this application must be a conscious choice.  It takes effort, and it doesn't come without opposition.  It is when we begin to transform our own lives that we can truly be impactful in the world around us.  Transformed Lives, Transforming Communities.

This month as I have been reading through the books of I and II Peter, I have been reminded of the fact that in everything we do, we should attempt to glorify Christ.  In fact, one of Florianne's challenges to us was to recognize times during the month of April when we were glorifying God.  For each of us, that experience looks different.  No two people are alike, so why would our journey be any different?  Our common goal should be that of allowing God's word to transform us.  But how that transformation looks will be different for each person.  One thing's for sure:  If we allow God . . . if we ask God to transform us, He will.

"So here's what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you."
~Romans 12:1-2, The Message~