About Scripture Stack
My name is Reid. I am a home-schooling dad who has been a long-time advocate of memorizing chunks of the Bible. And I have been a software developer for about 25 years.
The Beginning
My first exposure to serious Bible memorization came during college, when I heard that a fellow student in the Christian organization I was in on campus had memorized the first eight chapters of the book of Romans in the Bible.
During college, a staff member of that organization discipled me and several others — he had a profound influence on my life. His favorite chapter of the Bible was 2 Corinthians 5, so as a thank you to him, as I was leaving college, I memorized that chapter, which has been dear to me ever since.
I also remember back in those days spending my break time working at the local grocery store memorizing Isaiah 52:13-53:12, on the suffering servant.
"It's hard to describe how having a passage like this deep in my psyche over a lifetime has moved me so many times, especially on Good Friday, but regularly. Bible memorization is much more than just encapsulating theological truths and acquiring verses that can be shared in evangelistic opportunities."
Psalm 139 has been another such soul-stirring passage for me.
A Love Story Through Scripture
When I was in graduate school, the girl who would later become my wife and I played a lot of ping pong in the student dorm. A whole lot of ping pong.
I began to feel convicted that we were spending too much time playing ping pong, so I suggested to her that we spend as much time memorizing Scripture as we did playing ping pong.
Over the next five weeks, we both memorized Philippians verbatim, and then added 1 Peter and James before getting bogged down in Romans 1-8, in hindsight from trying to do it in chunks that were too large instead of the verse-by-verse layering we had been doing until then.
As a total side note: guys, it is nice when the first thing your future father-in-law ever says to you is, "So you have been memorizing a lot of Scripture with my daughter."
We would go on to get married and have six kids. Life got busy and our memorization efforts waxed and waned, but we incorporated that into our homeschooling as well.
The Evolution of Our Method
Our first approach to memorization was to write the passages down on 3x5 cards and carry them around with us, and use those to check each other as well whenever we had a spare moment.
Then at some point we also added writing down just the first letter of every word and practicing from that, which is a great in-between having the entire passage written and just reciting it with nothing in front of us.
Eventually, maybe 12 years ago, my older son, who was learning to program, built a simple web application that stored passages and had a toggle between the first letters and the whole words. That tool has been in use since then including us sharing it with some friends.
Scripture Stack Is Born
Jumping ahead to this year, my 9-year-old is well into the second chapter of Philippians, and my own goal for the year is to finally get down Romans 1-8 verbatim.
But it takes a long time during our family Bible times for my kids to check me, so, knowing that technology has advanced so much lately, I wanted to see what I could do with creating a web application that checked me and tracked my progress, something that my kids could also use and that we could share with others.
So Scripture Stack has really been in the works in my mind for over 30 years, but at least at the level I can access it, the technology has only recently caught up to what I have wanted to be able to do.
My hope is that many people, especially homeschooling families, will benefit from using Scripture Stack to bury deep into their hearts the eternal truths and persistent stirrings that come from memorization of long passages (and short).
Through the Valley
Almost four years ago, my dear wife Liz died of breast cancer at age 46.
The overwhelming flood of emotion from that was overwhelming. But through that, knowing, and having known, that "to live is Christ and to die is gain", which we had memorized back in our ping pong playing days, and that we die "so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life", which I had memorized in my undergraduate days, and that "all the days ordained for me were written in God's book before one of them came to be", which we had worked on with our kids so much, and that "all things work for the good of those who love him", from the pesky book of Romans, and so many other truths, helped carry me on.
Looking Forward
But now I am a single father, a homeschooling dad with a busy day job with a 9-year-old and a 13-year old still at home. So our homeschool approach has shifted, including them attending some classes locally and also us incorporating technology more into their education.
Scripture Stack will also help me help them in their memorization efforts, implanting truth and virtue that will help sustain them throughout their lives as well.