The Mystical Geek

While preparing for a lesson or a sermon, I sometimes find myself groping for a bible verse that I find relevant. The best way is to check a concordance or a dictionary. But sometimes there are verses that stick to the memory like broken fragmented shards -- "tortuous heart", "cup of wrath" -- where the words are dependent on a translation rendered according to a particular school of thought (NIV vis-a-vis NAB). Then, I have to go "around" the problem by going to the original Hebrew and Greek word and checking the appropriate concordance. That is tiring. So I have been preparing my own bible verse catalogue which is cross-linked to relevant footnotes in the NAB, JB, CCB and the Catechism.

What I do is that everytime I prepare a homily or a bible study session, I immediately break a particular verse selection into smaller fragments, copy the verses in a special notebook I keep for the task, and give it a title that I can remember (sometimes based on a keyword or a concept). When I get a good number of verses with their titles and notes, I transfer each of the references to a card as in the example below.

Currently I have about 500 cards arranged in alphabetical order under about a hundred titles. Some of these cards have cross-references to the catechism or to a footnote (in case of JB, NAB, or NIV translations). My notebook however contains more than 1000 bible verses (only the reference numbers, not the content) some of which have two titles (for easy reference).