Finished!

On Monday night--October 3rd, 2016--we finished reading the Book of Mormon aloud together as a family for the first time! It took us well over FOUR YEARS to read that 531 page book. I can't remember exactly when we started reading together, but I know we started right around when Jay could talk well enough to repeat a verse back to us when we read it to him. He was about 2.5 or 3 years old then, and he's nearly 7.5 now. We read one column per night. 531 pages with two columns per page equals 1062 columns, so 1062 days of reading to finish it at the rate of one column per day. That comes out to 2.9 years to finish it if we had read every single night, but we missed enough nights to add on at least another year and a half to that total.

Wow, now that I'm crunching these numbers, our accomplishment seems more like the tale of a turtle running through mud rather than a monumental feat! Maybe our slow progress and perseverance makes it more impressive that we managed to finish at all? Hah, not that the impressiveness matters in regards to scripture study. Those years it took us to read the Book of Mormon include some of the most intense times of our family's life--endless sickly pregnancies, various hospital stays, adventurous summers, cross country road trips apart, etc. Through it all, we kept that sticky Post-it Note bookmark moving over one column at a time, one day at a time, marking our progress. It felt like we would never finish! We didn't really ever think about finishing until we hit the book of Ether a few months ago, haha. Then we knew we'd most likely be done before the year was out! We redoubled our efforts.

Monday night for family home evening, we read the entire last chapter in the Book of Mormon--Moroni 10. Jay read the last verse in the whole book, and it was so awesome to hear his voice--so changed from that little 3 year old who used to repeat after us--read that final testimony in those familiar words:

"And now I bid unto all, farewell. I soon go to rest in the paradise of God, until my spirit and body shall again reunite, and I am brought forth triumphant through the air, to meet you before the pleasing bar of the great Jehovah, the Eternal Judge of both quick and dead. Amen." (Moroni 10:34)

After we finished the Book of Mormon on Monday night, Jeff said "guess what we're going to do tomorrow night? Start over!" The kids thought he was joking! Haha, but we are now back in 1 Nephi, only this time through we've decided to up our game and try for an entire page per night. It's a tad rough, and we've already missed two nights--Wednesdays I'm gone at the church for young women's and Saturday night everyone was too crazy-tired to handle much more than family prayer. Although, come to think of it, I did read the last four chapters of Shredderman #4 (by one of my faves, Wendelin Van Draanen) aloud to the kids on Saturday night and they sat perfectly still (minus Amber), with rapt attention through that. What is it about scripture time that brings out the wiggles and crazies? I half wish there was a way to calculate the percentage of verses we actually heard throughout the past four-plus years during family scripture reading! 

But thankfully, effort matters, and scripture reading is about the journey, not the destination. Tuesday night, I realized that we needed photographic evidence to document this important family accomplishment. So we took some celebratory family pictures, one night late:

Then the kids continued the celebration with a wrestling match...

Hurrah for the Book of Mormon!