Back at the beginning of this year, I set out to read the entire Bible in one year's time. Given that there are 1,189 chapters in the Protestant Bible, that works out to 3.25 chapters a day. I rounded up to four chapters to give me some padding for days that I missed, which turned out to be helpful. That said, four chapters a day is fairly aggressive.

My chapter rule was strict: four chapters per day, no more, no less. On days where a book finished with less than four chapters read, I would proceed to the next book on the schedule and read the remaining number of chapters.

In an effort to shake the reading up somewhat, I decided to set my schedule for two books of the Old Testament, followed by one book of the New Testament. So I started with Genesis and Exodus, then read Matthew; Leviticus and Numbers came next, followed by Mark (and so on). Bouncing back and forth like this was an interesting way to provide some variety. This worked fairly well in distributing the books, though at the end of the year I ended up with a number of New Testament books back to back.

I'm happy to say that I completed my read-through today! Here are some additional facts about this challenge:

• I used the New Living Translation, which I find to be the most easily comprehensible modern translation.
• In the end, I missed a total of 39 days during the year; not bad!
• My longest consecutive streak without missing a day was 37 days, between March 27 and May 2.
• The most number of unique books read in a day was four, on November 25. On this day I read 2 John, 3 John, Jude, and the first chapter of Revelation.

There were a few drawbacks to this scheme, however:

• Reading through Psalms and Proverbs consecutively gets pretty repetitive, pretty quickly. In the future, I think it would be better to chunk out these books and add those chunks to the reading plan. Something like: two Old Testament books, one New Testament book, four Psalms, and two chapters of Proverbs (or whatever makes sense schedule-wise).
• Forcing four chapters a day was interesting, but occasionally led to some odd chunking in the reading schedule. There were a number of times where I would read the final three chapters of a book and then the starting chapter of another, which broke the flow of the second book's narrative.
• Reading the minor prophets in order is also fairly repetitive; many of these books essentially have the same exact message from God, just sent to a different people group.

All that said, this was a neat challenge to try. I plan to do it again, though I will chunk things out differently next time. I'll also cap the reading at four chapters a day (so, no more than four, but less is OK). I also plan to use a different translation the next go-round, to also shake things up some.