Hello again, my friend! It feels like it’s been a very long time since I’ve written a post here, and I’ve missed it. More so, though, I have missed digging in God’s Word with you. I am so grateful to be back!

What happened?

When I wrapped up our last study, my plan was to update and reformat previous posts through the end of this year as I cared for an ailing relative post-surgery. Oh, what naïveté! I spent much of October and all of November as a full-time caregiver. Not because my family member required that much care, but I was so unskilled and unfamiliar with the role, it took a long time to trust myself in it.

Then last month, my husband and I spent Christmas with our family up north. While there, the whole house came down with various versions of this season’s flu bug. And I am finding—to my chagrin—healing takes longer. In this case, much longer. As I write this post, I am still not fully recovered. I am healthy enough to sit at my desk and study my Bible, though. And I give God all the glory for that!

Process Changes

I mentioned before my hiatus I was making some tweaks to the DISO process from feedback received after a beta reader review of my book manuscript in 2022. The main problem, my readers said, was the process can be overwhelming. Even highly motivated women didn’t feel they could successfully sustain this type of Bible study long term. If I really want you to use and benefit from DISO Bible study (and I do!), it had to be simplified.

Through research, discussion, and much, much prayer this fall, the Lord has shown me how to walk through a piece of Scripture in just five steps: Pray, Survey, Mine, Refine, and Align.

In previous blogs using the “20 Questions,” I demonstrated answering each question with every passage we studied. That gave the impression we should assign all the questions the same level of importance every time we study Scripture. Since then, I’ve realized that is not always true for all women every time. As a temporary caregiver, I often didn’t have the time to even read my previous posts, let alone study a new passage. So, I didn’t study. And, predictably, the enemy of my soul came looking for a foothold.

But in my wrestling, God revealed any study is good study when it follows inductive Bible study basics: see what the passage says (observation), understand correctly what it means (interpretation), and practice what it preaches (application).

So, beginning next week, I’ll demonstrate this new process the same way I have in previous posts. Each week, I’ll show you the work I’ve done and explain how the Holy Spirit led my study. Each blog will end with Dig-In Challenges, steps you can take to study with me if you like. We will still look for certain elements in the text, consider the same resources to interpret what we’ve found, and answer the same four questions based on 2 Timothy 3:16-17 to use what we’ve discovered. Now, though, the emphasis will be less about answering all twenty questions with equal vigor, and more about learning to recognize the promptings that will help us use the appropriate questions to dig deeply into a single treasure in the passage.

So, instead of digging a wide trench with all the questions, we’ll follow the Spirit to extract a smaller section of the study passage (a sentence, phrase, or just a few words) and mine, refine, and align with that treasure alone.

I hope as we work through these new steps, you’ll be moved to provide feedback about the changes. The best way to do this, I think, is direct email to me (jen@jencason.com). Thank you so much for sticking with me, my friend. Join me next week as we pick up where we left off in the Miracles of Jesus series using the new DISO process to see what God wants to show us there.

It is good to be back!