(It’s guest post Friday! Here’s one from Some Guy, an engineer from Michigan. If you want to write a guest post for SCL, here’s how.)
Sword drills 2.0 – By Some Guy
“Hold on while my Bible loads.”
That’s what someone said the other week in Sunday School when she was asked to read a verse. That’s where we are these days with all these gadgets.
Back when I was in grade school, we ran sword drills (or Bible drills for those of you who are less hardcore) the old-fashioned way–we had to turn the pages of our printed Bibles.
I had a hardcover Bible for a while in grade school. You do not want that. That cover slows down the flippability way too much. I thought about handicapping the kids who always won the sword drills by making them use the Bibles with the hard covers.
But then came a new problem–tabs.
Kids started using Bibles with all the books marked on the sides. No more guessing where Jeremiah is. Just look and go.
Cheaters.
Now we have Bible apps. Just type in the reference, and it pops right up. It does the searching for you. You don’t even need to know if Joel is in the Old Testament or New Testament. You don’t need to know the difference between Jude and Job.
What’s the point of competing against that?
Do not worry–those iPod/iPad people have an Achilles heel. They can still be defeated. I’ll let you in on my secret, as long as you promise not to use it against me.
Hook up the voice-recognition app to the Bible software.
When everybody else is holding up their Bibles, you hold up your smartphone and start the voice recognition. As the leader says the reference, your app is already finding that verse. Then all you have to do is stand up and start reading whatever’s on the screen.
I think that’s about as fast as you can make it, although you can make it a little more lazy. Just have the text-to-speech app read the verse aloud for you.
Maybe that’s why no one does sword drills anymore.
Did you ever do those when you were growing up?
(For more great stuff from Some Guy, check out his blog: someblogsite.com)
