Using your Bible Reading Plan

When you select a Bible reading plan in the book view, the reading area displays a calendar. The day area of each day of the calendar shows you the actual passages that you should read for this day:

This screenshot displays a plan with a passage from the Old Testament, one from the New Testament and a verse from the Proverbs for each day. The day in yellow represents today's date. Clicking on a link will display the passage in a Bible view.

For example, if one clicks on the Prov 1:1 link above (first link in the Sept 8 day), the Bible view will display the following: clip0061

This is a normal Bible view, but the Start Reading mark/line has been added to help you identify the place where your reading starts. You may read through until you encounter the Stop Reading mark/line, that represents the end of the selected passage:

Notice that theWord tracks your readings on a session basis! This means that you can mark a session as completed either by clicking on the Done link above, or by just clicking the small check mark in the calendar view:

In this particular example, there are 3 different readings for the Sept 8 date, so the other two links (Matt 1 and Prov 1:1) should be clicked and read before the completed mark is set.

When the Book view displays a Bible Reading Plan, the Topic List on the left displays 3 top-level nodes:

Clicking on the Calendar View and List View nodes expands them and displays sub-entries for each month of your plan. Clicking on them makes the reader jump to this month.

Notice that theWord provides an alternate List View method to display your sessions:

As mentioned in the section where you create your reading plan, theWord allows you to create a Bible Reading plan without binding it to specific calendar dates. In that case, you only have a number of sessions that you can read any time you want. For such reading plans, the Calendar View makes no sense, so it is disabled (the No Calendar days found in Reading Plan message appears).

Notice that in this case, the left column shows the sessions counted from 1 (Session 1, Session 2, etc), instead of the calendar days.

Current Progress: The first part of this screen displays some statistics concerning your reading progress and your plan.

Falling behind on your schedule?: This function allows you to Catch Up on your reading plan if you have missed some days. Just click on the Catch Up button to shift any unread scheduled readings forward, so you start today with the first unread session.

Want to restart?: allows you to restart you reading-plan, by marking all your sessions as incomplete, and also shifting the start date to today (and of course re-calculating the calendar days, starting from today).

TIP: Although you can restart a reading-plan, you cannot change the days that you want to read. For example, if you have created a reading plan where you read every day of the week but then you decide that you only want to read on the weekdays and not on weekends, you cannot change that from this screen. Yet, there is a way to do this by creating a new reading plan based on an existing one!

To do so, you need to go to File -> New Bible Reading Plan menu, and select the Choose a pre-defined reading plan option. On the Next screen, just choose from the list your existing plan (be sure that the show templates only option is not checked). From then on, you can re-select your calendar options from the Next screen.

Using this method will create a new plan: you can then choose to Delete the existing one if you want (you can delete a reading plan just like any other Book).

TIP: theWord allows you to have more than one Reading Plans active! This means that you can create as many reading plans as you want and follow them independently. The Daily Readings dialog gives you a complete picture of your daily readings, each day.

Read the Daily Readings topic to see how you can access all the readings of a specific date from a single place.