Bible Journalling

I attended a district meeting Saturday.  The program was about journalling in our Bible.  When I was a child I thought if you made marks in your Bible you would go to Hell.  Afterall the Bible is a sacred book and you should not deface it.  It is the words of Jesus, not a book to color in.  It took me a very long time to realize it was ok for me to mark verses, words that meant something to me, passages I would go back to when I need them, etc.  So Saturday I listened to the speaker talk about why she journals in her bible, drawing pictures that show how she feels when reading it, marking passages with ribbons or tags, etc.  I came home and of course went to Pinterest because everything about everything is on Pinterest, who needs Google.  While many pages were so journalled you could not read the words, some of them were simple additions to make a passage mean more to the person reading it.  I have 3 Bibles and they have very thin paper and not much room in the margin to do anything with.  My main Bible I read has underlined passages and stars by certain verses, but doing anything more I fear would tear the pages.  I got to thinking about why would I want to journal in my Bible.  Some people have a journal for their Bible which is separate book so they don't mark up too much of their Bible.  I found a Journal Bible on Amazon and ordered it.  I am not a drawer, I can barely draw a stick figure but I can make it so the words that have certain meanings to me are more visible.  This morning as I was working on the catalog for the church library I got to thinking that people scrapbook their life of events that mean something to them and "scrapbooking" or journalling in my Bible was my way to scrapbook my life with God.  So I can't wait to have my new Bible arrive and start a new journey of my life with God.