To properly document and organize your personal encounters with God is perhaps the most challenging key to accomplish. Why? Because this key deals with the heavy lifting. In the the first key, I mention how easy it is for us to hit the record button on our smart phones recording app in order to capture an audio file of any given experience with God. This second key is not so easy.
The heavy lifting is the part where you have to take that audio file and transcribe it into a well-organized document. That’s just the beginning. Once you have it transcribed and well-organized, you need a home for it. And, as you document and organize more encounters, you’ll need a home for those. So, what you really need is a systematic way of recording, documenting and organizing all of your God-encounters.
What I mean by document
Hitting the record button on our recording app is a form of documentation but when I say document, I’m talking about producing an accurately transcribed document. Having the audio file is a great start but if that audio file doesn’t get transformed into text, it may soon get buried underneath more and more audio files. If you have both an audio file and a transcribed document, you have done some of the heavy lifting.
What I mean by organize
When I say “organize”, I mean two things. Your transcribed document should be organized. It should have a title and paragraphs. Next, you should categorize your encounter. Is it an encouraging or prophetic word from someone? Is it a dream you had while sleeping? Perhaps you’ve had a vision? Whatever type of encounter you’ve had, it can be categorized.
Even after you’ve documented and organized a few personal encounters with God, you’ll soon find you’ll get disorganized quickly. The American Heritage Dictionary defines organize like this: “To put in order; arrange in an orderly way”1. Putting things in order or arranging things in an orderly way is the first step in creating a system that keeps things organized.
Now, before we even think to complain about doing all this “heavy lifting”, that is documenting and organizing, let’s consider the way the ancient scribes used to produce copies of God’s word. Now, I realize this is talking about copying, not transcribing, but it is a similar process.
The way the ancients documented and organized
This list below is a stark contrast to how easily we can record our personal encounters with God. The Jewish scribes had and continue to have the highest value for God’s word in the way they have preserved the scriptures throughout the ages.
- They could only use clean animal skins, both to write on, and even to bind manuscripts.
- Each column of writing could have no less than forty-eight, and no more than sixty lines.
- The ink must be black, and of a special recipe.
- They must verbalize each word aloud while they were writing.
- They must wipe the pen and wash their entire bodies before writing the word “Jehovah,” every time they wrote it.
- There must be a review within thirty days, and if as many as three pages required corrections, the entire manuscript had to be redone.
- The letters, words, and paragraphs had to be counted, and the document became invalid if two letters touched each other. The middle paragraph, word and letter must correspond to those of the original document.
- The documents could be stored only in sacred places (synagogues, etc).
- As no document containing God’s Word could be destroyed, they were stored, or buried, in a genizah – a Hebrew term meaning “hiding place.” These were usually kept in a synagogue or sometimes in a Jewish cemetery. 2.
The ancient way with a modern twist
After years of trying to find the cheapest transcription company, endless hours of testing every transcription app on the market, and many more hours using a combination of methods with google docs and voice typing, Dropbox comes to the rescue!
What used to take hours, weeks, even months, is now available to be performed in minutes. I stumbled upon a little known feature Dropbox released that does the heavy lifting for me. By heavy lifting, I mean transcribing my audio files… for free!
If free, accurate, and automatic transcription is not a treasure for those who desire to steward their encounters with God, I don’t know what is.
Documenting and organizing gets easier with a system
Documenting and organizing your encounters is not easy but it can get easier. I found that I needed to establish a system that would be robust enough to handle any type of encounter with God I have. So I built a system for myself that handles the organization. Since I started stewarding my encounters with a great system, my ability to record, document, and organize my encounters has skyrocketed.
Most people I ask really want their prophetic words, dreams, and those times when God speaks to them recorded, documented, and organized, so they can easily review them at any time. I have also wanted this for years and have worked hard at a system’s level of accomplishing this, much credit to James Clear’s way of thinking for working on systems.
I have been able to record, document, and organize any single personal encounter with God within minutes.