Take Up & Read

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What's It All About?

For nearly a decade now, I have had a desire to write and share devotions to go along with daily Scripture study. During that time, I've talked the dream with a few close friends. And with some of them, I've traded essays back and forth in various places, and we've grown in friendship with each other and the Lord. In spring 2017, the opportunity to widen our circle presented itself. We gathered a few more women, across generations, and wrote some small essays that would inspire us—and you— to daily take up the Word and read it.

When the volume was finished, we found it unexpectedly without a home. 

So, one was created here.

In printed journals that you can hold in your hands and touch with your pens, we collected our conversations with God. These volumes allow us to both commit at least a little time daily to honest conversation with God in His Word, and to dig more deeply and respond more carefully when we have the grace to do so.

This site is for the overflow. We have gathered here to share with you our enthusiasm for God’s Word and to be encouraged by your insights as you read. What we want here is to hear your hearts, share your burdens,  celebrate your joys, and pray the Scripture with you. 

We come here with intention— to hold ourselves accountable to reading and pondering and responding to the Word of the Lord. We are Catholic women who hear and pray the Word liturgically in our worship spaces, but seek also to make Him personal in our hearts and our homes. And we welcome our sisters from across denominations into our conversations.

We know that the Bible is God’s story for us. And we want to live in the center of that holy narrative every day. We want God’s Word to give us words for one another, a common language of love in Him. 

God’s Word endures—across the seasons of a woman’s life it is the constant. He is faithful every day. In every restless night, in every joyous celebration, in all the ordinary days in between, we can and do seek the voice of our Lord in His Holy Scripture.

We take our name from the pages of Saint Augustine’s Confessions. Now a Doctor of the Church, Augustine was living a life of miserable debauchery when he was compelled by the Holy Spirit to take up his Bible and read it. His entire world changed in a moment of conversation with Word. 

We believe that ours can, too—on an ordinary day, in an ordinary living room or coffee shop or college dorm, to ordinary women. We pray it is so every single day.

So much love and hope has been poured into this project. I'm so happy this day has finally come, and I'm overjoyed that you're here

Please introduce yourself. I've been alone in this space far too long.

Together, let's create a beautiful gathering of friends in the Word. 

Elizabeth Foss