Reading our Bibles regularly can be a challenge, but we're all on this journey together.

We're praying that this podcast inspires you, helps you better understand God's Word, and builds your faith.

This is Join the Journey with your host, Emma Daughter.

Thanks for joining. Do you ever find yourself trapped in religious rulekeeping? You get into this routine of going to community group, church on Sunday, and checking the box of a quiet time. You catch yourself going through the motions.

When I was in third grade, my family lived in Pennsylvania for about eight months, and I remember going to Sunday school at this one church. And as a kid who'd

moved around a ton, I'd visited a lot of churches. And this was by far the coolest church slash

Sunday school I'd ever been to. And one of the things that made it so cool was that every Sunday

they'd give out prizes to the kids who completed the weekly Bible study

pamphlet. Honestly, it was kind of like joined the journey for kids. You'd get five days at a time

with a short passage assigned and a couple questions to work through. And then, if you brought

the pamphlet back the following Sunday, you would get a prize from the prize locker,

which had so many cool things in it that kids would want. Full-sized candy bars, packets of fun dip, the big ones, t-shirts,

some miscellaneous toys, and they also had a brand new purple Walkman with behind-the-ear headphones.

And they'd give away these prizes for different things,

doing the Bible study or games and whatnot.

And let me tell you, I wanted that CD Walkman so badly.

So I'd do my Bible study diligently.

And after several weeks of me being so determined to get that CD player, having

received candy bar after candy bar, one Sunday, the moment came. In the kids pastor, honestly, I think was

just so blown away by how many Sundays in a row I'd done the study and got in a candy bar

that he just decided he was going to give me the Walkman that'd been sitting there for months

out of the blue without me asking for it. So I was also a super, super shy kid that I never would

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