Living in Spite of Yourself

This week, my wonderful church started a new women's Bible study: Living Beyond Yourself by Beth Moore. I took this Bible study five years ago, but life has gotten so busy that I need a refresher. How do you know if you need it? Well, if it is Wednesday morning and you know you cannot possibly get everything done that you need to get done by Friday without losing your mind, this is the study for you. Why? You learn to tap into a power, and a person, higher than yourself to get through the day without losing your cool or telling someone what you really think.

By relying upon the Holy Spirit, you end up enjoying Fruit whether or not everything on your to-do list gets a checkmark: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. What? Get rid of all your bad habits while doing everything on your list. Nope! Fruit like that doesn't come naturally: it comes supernaturally through the Holy Spirit working in your heart. If you really don't think you need it, check out how many times you whine or vent on a Facebook status.

Besides supernatural power, other things have helped us keep up with our studies (we just wrapped up Day 18 and are half way through Week 4). Today, I will share how I set up my audio disc. Some of our day is primarily audio: Spanish lessons, folk song, hymn, Spanish song, Spanish fairy tales, recitation, composer study, listening to Librivox recordings, etc. Having it all on the computer means it is not portable. Today, in between delivering meals to the elderly through meals on wheels, Pamela did all of her audio work: forty minutes freed up to do something else at home! I have a hard time keeping track of one CD, much less five or six. Plus, that means getting up and switching disks every time we transition to another activity. By putting everything I need for the week on one CD, the day runs more smoothly: we can take it to the car with us or we can flip through tracks with the remote control.

Here are some tips that have helped me:

1. I put everything in order of frequency. The things we do every day go at the beginning of the CD, so we avoid wasting time flipping through tracks. The stuff we do only once a week goes at the end of the CD.

2. I love Audacity, which lets you edit your sound recordings. Before making a CD, I edit individual files for various reasons.

• I edit the tempo (change the speed without changing the pitch). When someone speaks too quickly (Spanish or an audio book), I slow down the recording without making the changing the speaker's vocal quality.
• I remove any annoying background noise. 
• To introduce vocabulary words for Spanish, I copy and paste the person in the story saying the word. We listen to new words and point to pictures before the story begins to build our vocabulary.
• I include only the part of the story we are reading. Because the Spanish fairy tales are short, we listen from beginning to the current stopping point. I cut the ending out so we know exactly where to stop. For Spanish only, we listen to the same segment two or three times a week. Our goal is building our ear for we already know the story.
• I break up the English readings that are stories into day-by-day chunks. So, if we have five passages from the same book that week, I will have five different tracks with only the passage we need for each day. I have tabs and marks on the pages in the book so Pamela can find the right spot on the page on her own if I am driving.

3. I put all audio work in blue ink (not black) on our weekly schedule for quick reference.