Joel

First off I want to express how thankful I am that God has blessed me, us, to be able to come to a school where reading and discussing scripture is a norm and getting deep into the text is something that happens in every classroom. This has never been a norm in my life because I've been going to public school my entire life. Prayer and scripture reading was something that never happened in the classroom, rather just in Sunday school and as the pastor read it in service during his sermons.

Reading Joel was a little different because you see a lot of down points in the text but then it also talks about the faithfulness of God and how He is going to provide for His people. Reading the text out loud in class on Monday was helpful to me because I feel like sometimes we just read the text in our devotions or just read it to ourselves and we don't get the full impact of everything the text is saying. When we read it out loud it gives power to the text and life to the text. As people read Joel out loud I began to pick up on some things that I hadn't when I read it just by myself. But now that I think of it, I even read some of the text out loud to my roommate when I was preparing for class this weekend. We want to share things that touch our hearts; and that's what I was doing as I read verses that I wanted to proclaim out loud because it was so impactful in my reading the literature. So reading the words out loud in class was almost like me reading them to the girls in my room as I read it the night before. It was a great activity and I’m glad we had a chance to experience the text like that.