She Memorized 100 Verses in 100 Days…Barely (w/ Faith Womack)

It started as a fun challenge and quickly turned into something she NEVER expected. Listen as Josh talks with Faith Womack about her experience memorizing Scripture – what she loved, what she did wrong and how she recommends people learn from her mistakes.

Learn more about Faith Womack:

• Memorizing 100 Verses in 100 Days:
• I DON’T Recommend memorizing 100 verses in 100 days:
• How to do Verse Mapping:

Faith Womack Interview Transcript

Faith Womack:
It just was like, boom. That idea, which I probably would say is from the Lord of like, Hey, get scrappy with it. And I’m so glad that happened because it really did change the game for me. So I did things like stamps and washing tape and little scrapbook paper and tried to make the cards reflect my feelings or emotions around the Bible verse.

Josh Summers:
This is Bible Memory Goal. My name is Josh, and you just heard from Faith Womack. She’s the woman behind How to Faith a Life, a popular YouTube channel that encourages people to dig deeper into the Word, to understand their faith and to become what she calls a “Bible nerd”. Now, a little while back, Faith challenged herself to memorize a hundred verses in a hundred days, and honestly, it didn’t go exactly like she had planned. There’s a lot of things that she learned in the process that she’s going to tell us about in this conversation as well as talking us through what she would have done differently and how she goes about studying a verse that she’s going to memorize. I think you’re going to really love this. So let’s go ahead and dive in.

Faith Womack:
And I don’t know if I said this in my videos a whole lot, but when I do any sort of challenge, I do think about how can I make this a video and encourage other people to join me? I do think about that as somebody with a little bit of influence in this world. It’s like, how can I encourage people in an edifying way? And so I was like, well, I really want to memorize scripture. What better way to keep myself accountable or really just even make it a better thing than just me growing is encourage other people to enjoy me, wait to join me, encourage other people to join me, and to also kind of make it this challenge thing bobber. And I really didn’t expect it to end up being a spectacle of my failure to be honest. It really, and praise the Lord in that, that he can still be glorified in my failure.
But how? It was an odd way to walk that journey of how can I encourage other people to memorize scripture while all they’re seeing is basically me fail and to God do the glory for my failure, but also please go memorize scripture. Just because I failed doesn’t mean you can’t. And so I mean, a big part of it was just trying to encourage other people to join me. I do have a lot of people in my audience that are kind of newer Christians, or maybe they just don’t even read their Bible. Nevermind, think about memorizing scripture. And I mean, my big thing that I say all the time is if we believe it’s true, we’re going to treat it. It’s true. So we’re going to be faithful to it. We’re going to read it, we’re going to memorize it. And so this was just another kind of aspect to that argument. If we really believe it’s true, we’re going to treat it like it’s true. But again, I think even just your audience being here and listening to this podcast, the fact that they want to memorize scripture is just so many more steps ahead than some of the people that were watching my video. So I was like, if I can just encourage ’em to memorize one verse, I will be so grateful. And of course, along the way, I did learn verses even though I,

Josh Summers:
Yeah, no, and sometimes I think, so when I first started memorizing long passages, I would actually take and record. Once I finished a book like the book of James, I would record myself saying it, and I kid You not Faith, it took me two days because I wanted to get it exactly right. So it took me 50 takes to get the whole thing, and then I’d finally get the whole thing and then I’d upload it. And it wasn’t until later when I had other people in our community that would upload and then they would make mistakes in the middle of it that people actually resonated more with the mistakes than they did with me just trying over and over again until I finally got it right. You know what I mean?

Faith Womack:
Yeah, no, totally. I think we also hold ourselves to a higher standard than we hold other people. If I saw one of your videos, I’d be like, wow, what an encouraging endeavor. I want to go try that. And I would almost kind of laugh at your mistakes. While if I was the one making the mistakes, I would beat myself up. Think about it at 1:00 AM where I’m laying in bed, all the things.

Josh Summers:
Exactly.

Faith Womack:
Yeah. There’s also just that we get really legalistic with memorization. It has to be perfect, and I won’t forgive myself unless it is.

Josh Summers:
Yeah. Oh man. So I’m glad you brought that up. That’s one thing that I wanted to ask about because you asked a question in your video, how legalistic do I want to be in my memorization? Do I want then or so then, or how did you end up on that after a hundred days of doing this?

Faith Womack:
Yeah, so I obviously memorizing a hundred verses a hundred days. I was able to be a lot more strict on myself in the first, my guess is like 20 to 30 days. So that first month I was like word for word, and by the time I got to the end of that month, I was like, I don’t know if it’s as profitable spending my mental energy worrying about the buts and the sos if I’m basically just saying a synonym versus I spend all my mental energy on those little words as I call them,
And then I miss the heart of it preaching to myself these truths, because purposely I wasn’t doing big passages. I just chose verses that are good for teaching life, discipling my boys, things like that. I really wanted these verses to have that heart behind them so that my brain is triggered when I talk about death to think of this versus whatever. So yeah, that was kind of my heart and my intent. So anyway, that was, I eventually, after the first 30 days of memorizing Bible verses every day was kind of like I let go a little bit of those high standards and said, it’s okay if I fumble through them as long as I correct myself afterwards. Another thing, sometimes you learn more by being like, no, but your husband’s saying, oh, it’s actually, but instead of, and because that is a word that can change the argument of the verse, whether or not you take it out of context, words matter. But when it comes to memorization, I can get really discouraged and actually lose endurance if I really hold that over my head.

Josh Summers:
Yeah, no, I know exactly what you mean. Walk us through for a moment, because the cool part about your first video, there’s two videos, both of them will be linked in the description below or in the episode notes. You were very creative about how you went about doing this, and I liked your reasoning, why. Can you dive into your thinking, why you decided to just really be creative on this, what exactly you did?

Faith Womack:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I am naturally very scrappy and artsy. I started making scrapbooks when I was in fourth grade, so I’m 10. I’m not doing anything with my life, but I’m scrapbooking it. I just love paper arts. I love making something beautiful out of nothing. All of that. And I have grown in really, I guess maturity spiritually to be like, Hey, that doesn’t take away from the value. When I was a baby Christian, I would’ve been like, no, you can’t get scrappy in your bible notes or in your bridge journal or whatever it is. So day one, when I sat down to be like, okay, this is going to be the first day I start memorizing scripture, it just was like, boom. That idea, which I probably would say is from the Lord of like, Hey, get scrappy with this. And I’m so glad that that happened because it really did change the game for me.
So I did things like stamps and washy tape and little scrapbook paper and tried to make the cards reflect my feelings or emotions around the Bible verse so that I would kind of connect meditatively. I hate using that word because people have different concepts around the word, but just be thinking about the verse as I made the card and reflect that in the stickers or the stamps or the die DTSs or whatever I use. And so I have them all right here. If people are watching video format and you can see they’re just colorful and they’re stamps and wax seals and things like that, which just kind of ended up being what kept me going because there were some days I didn’t want to go try and pick my Bible first. There were some days where I felt like I was already drowning under verses, but I did want to go use my cute artsy supplies, and I did want to sit down and make a cute little wax seal or whatever, which also goes into, I let myself have free range with that.
If I felt like I was running out of washy tape, I let myself do that and go order some more or buy some more. Because again, it’s worth that craftiness, if it gets you in the word, it’s worth buying the supplies if it gets you in the word. I tell my boys this every morning when we’re doing our catechism questions. Sometimes they’ll give a hard time. They’re like, I don’t want to do it. I’m like, this is the most important part of your day when you’re preaching those truths over yourself. And so I would say that to myself as well, when I started to feel guilty for buying more art supplies or whatever, it’s like, no, this is going to get me in the word. So I think there’s an aspect to which even if someone’s not crafty, but they’re sporty or they love working on cars, we can use the ways that the Lord created us and our natural interests, that’s the word,

Josh Summers:
Natural

Faith Womack:
Interests, to get us into these really spiritually edifying things so that we can even go and work on our old Ford without thinking about Bible memorization or whatever it is. Because now I have my wax seals hanging up on the wall over there, and I can’t look at ’em without thinking about specific verses where I really just was vibing with that silly little wax seal. It’s so silly. But at the same time, that’s how the Lord wired me, and I’m going to use it to memorize more scripture for sure.

Josh Summers:
Yeah, absolutely. No, I love that. The way you said that even before was you tricking your brain into wanting to do this, and it’s kind of those, or not memory hacks, but habit hacks where you’re kind of adding an additional motivation, which sometimes seems like it’s wrong. I had a friend who would say, Hey, I get my special cup of coffee every time I sit down to do my Bible study, and my brain looks forward to that cup of coffee, but I attach that to sitting down to the Bible study so that I can make sure that I’m doing that. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that at all. You’re tricking your brain into wanting to do that.

Faith Womack:
The secular world does that. How much more can we take that and redeem it, right, and use it for Exactly. Growth. Exactly.

Josh Summers:
Yeah, I love that. So when I was watching your a hundred verses a hundred day video, it felt earlier on than you might expect, where you started really showing signs of, oh my gosh, what have I gotten into? It wasn’t day 60, 70, it was like day 40. You know what I mean?

Faith Womack:
Oh, I know al well,

Josh Summers:
But yes, you do. Yes, you do. And I resonate with that because we were talking about earlier, I had set this goal, this really crazy ambitious goal to finish the New Testament in a couple of years, which absolutely ridiculous. And the thing that I didn’t take into account, which it sounds like you didn’t take into account either, was how much effort review takes when you’re doing this. What was that experience like for you? And was that what was really weighing you down, or was there something else?

Faith Womack:
Well, you can probably already tell from our little interactions that we’ve had. I’m pretty a d D or a D H D, whatever, not diagnosed, but I’m very much that. And so my brain is already on 15 things at a time. So literally it was day 15, I was driving down the road and I was already thinking about two verses at the same time and trying to review them at the same time. And I was like, hold up, Lord, I know you made me this way, Lord, I know your scripture’s good, but I cannot function at this rate when I’m on day, whatever, 67. And so I talk about in the video, my brain started to feel like this verse soup, little portions of scripture would pop into my mind instead of whole verses. And I was memorizing verses. I wanted big chunks of scripture to pop up into my mind, not little phrases and stuff like that. And it just became this verse soup, especially because I would go through three days of memorizing Bible verses that had the same kind of theme. Ones on the Lord would provide. I think I memorized four days straight of verses around, the Lord will provide, and they start to

Josh Summers:
Really kind of, yeah,

Faith Womack:
I do. If I was to do it over, I would totally memorize a book or a chapter or something and start that way because that was so much easier when I went on trips and it was like, I’ve got six days back to back of verses, oh, I remember this so much better than just random verses here and there. But anyway, your question was if

Josh Summers:
Review, how did that feel for you?

Faith Womack:
Yes. So reviewing was really time consuming and I’m a multitasker. I also have literally every hour of my day mapped out or else I’ll go on a rabbit trail and just be like scrapbooking while I’m supposed to be folding laundry. So I have to schedule out my days, and it took so much more time than I allotted. I think I originally allotted an hour every single day to review, but by the end, I couldn’t make it through all the reviews every single day or even every single week because I just didn’t have time. Or I’d get distracted, we’d start talking about the verse, or I’d start checking out the other translations and it would lead me to Bible study, which is great, but just review alone, especially when you’re looking at verses from all different books was a lot more time consuming. And I eventually had to give myself grace in that area and just be, review what you can without getting overwhelmed and starting to cry, or if it leads you to Bible study, that’s a win, not a disappointment.
So anyway, if I did it over again, I would have my husband join me on the challenge so that we could quiz each other a little bit better. There were times where I felt guilty for asking him to help me quiz, because he’s a pastor, he’s been studying the Bible all day long. He’s tired and he wants to lay down for bed. And I’m sitting here going, Hey, will you help me review 73 verses? Not that that’s bad, but my husband probably wanted to sleep and he was just in there. Okay, well, you kind of messed up waters, whatever it was. Yeah. I also didn’t film enough of those highs and lows of just reviewing scripture, and I wish I did that because there were some days where it just led me to near panic attack of, I’ve totally messed up this verse that I memorized a month ago, whatever it was.

Josh Summers:
Yeah, I was telling you earlier, Faith that when I saw you in the video holding your stack, once it got to day 50 and you had this stack of it becomes pretty thick, I started getting anxious for you

Faith Womack:
Just

Josh Summers:
Looking at all of that. And one thing that you did differently than I did, which I don’t know whether it’s good or bad, but I had to face the reality at some point and say, you know what? The goal I set was a little too ambitious. I’m going to have to go back and reset this. But for you, you kept on, I mean, for the a hundred days, and you did finish it, are you glad that you went through and finished it? And then what would you say to somebody else that’s looking at memorizing verses?

Faith Womack:
That’s good. Okay, so I’m glad I finished it because I do think if I didn’t finish it to the best of my ability, granted I didn’t finish it completely how I thought it would look like, but because I did finish it to the best of my ability, I’m willing to memorize scripture again. But if I had just given up on day 37 or whatever, I would have this bad taste of my mouth and knowing myself and my own sinful nature, I probably would be a whole lot more hesitant to memorize another piece of scripture because I’ve failed. I spent 37 days or whatever it is, filming it, and then I had to throw away. There’s all this shame around it mentally and again, it’s about tricking your brain and to being like, no, this was still pleasant experience. I still learned so much scripture. I now still have a hundred verses.
I can review every single day if I want to. And again, it’s one of those things of I did it to the best of my ability because the Lord made me and he made me with those limits. And so I can embrace those limits and give myself grace because the Lord literally wrote grace into my human limits. So I totally would definitely do this again because of that. But if I quit halfway through, I probably, it would probably take me a decade to return to trying to do a big challenge like that again. But if someone like you set aside and said, okay, I want to have the whole New Testament memorized in two years, and they realized it was going to take longer, I would say just keep going. Give yourself another year. Give yourself two more years, five more years, whatever it is, but don’t just quit all out.

Josh Summers:
Yeah, just reset the timeframe. So then if you’ve got somebody maybe that hasn’t done a whole lot of scripture memory in the past and all they know is maybe what they saw growing up with Sunday school or who knows, maybe not even that, and they’re coming at this pretty fresh, what would be your recommendations as they come into this? Would there be a certain number of verses? Would you be giving it a timeframe? How would you want them to approach that in a way that would be most beneficial?

Faith Womack:
Yeah. I personally, I would say, especially if they’re squirrely brained like me and kind of ed whatever, memorize a portion of scripture, review it every single day, I am very analog because if I’m not touching and seeing it, it’s out of my brain. If I can’t see it, I’m not going to think about it. And so I had my memory cards on my nightstand table. I couldn’t go to bed in the night without reviewing. There was those physical reminders, and I would bring my card with me everywhere because it’s a physical reminder. So I would encourage them to give themselves a way where they know for sure they’re not going to forget about it. They know for sure that they can’t go max three hours through their day without thinking about their verse. I once tried memorizing scripture with the screen on my phone, the lock screen, but I just looked right past it, so that work for me.
But a physical card, I’m very neat. And so I’m always picking up around her house and I’d be like, oh, what’s this card doing here? Oh, it’s my memory card. I got to review it while I go put it up or whatever, sit on the treadmill and just staring at it. I love long runs at a slow pace, and I would just stare at it and memorize it and memorize it, memorize it. Sometimes I’d bring verses to review, and that was really, really good for me because it’s right there in front of my face. So I think everybody, even if it’s on your mirror, in your bathroom, your car, if you’re sitting in traffic for a lot of your day, everybody has excuses on why they should memorize scripture. But I think we just highlight the excuses on why we shouldn’t.

Josh Summers:
Yeah. I think, I wonder how much, I was looking at some of your cards and you would have verses split up between hearts that you had cut out how much, which is awesome. How much do you think that the location and the actual creativity of putting that together helped you memorize more than just repeating it over and over? Do you see the card when you recite some of these verses?

Faith Womack:
Not as much as I thought, really. I thought I would visualize the card

Josh Summers:
And

Faith Womack:
Some of the early ones I do still kind of visualize. I think about, okay, that one was very pink, but I don’t have every aspect of that card memorized.

Josh Summers:
Interesting.

Faith Womack:
A big part of that first initial idea to be creative with each card was because whenever I try and memorize something, I typically use three by fives. And in the past I would kind of cheat because I would know, oh, well, that’s a long verse, and it’s written when it’s just black on white. You can kind of differentiate more than everything’s different. You would think that I would be like, oh, I can see a little bit of pink through this card, so this must be, but instead it’s like, oh, that’s just another one on the pink cards that I made. And they’re all kind of chunky and weird and misshapen, and so it actually, it’s easier for me to get lost to them and not know them from just looking at the blank side, if that makes sense. Because one side’s blank with the verse reference and the other side’s creative. And so I think really the creativity serves as I want to look at him because they’re beautiful, and then also it got me to make ’em and review. But yeah, you would think I would picture the cuteness and I don’t. I really don’t.

Josh Summers:
Right, boss. Yeah. Yeah. Well, one of the things that I really resonated with in your videos was this idea that the point of memorization is not just to check off a box. It’s not to say, I’ve memorized a hundred verses or I’ve memorized X number of books or whatever your goal might be. It’s to get you in the word and to understand the word. And one of the things that you mentioned and talked about that I would love for you to expand on a little bit is you talked about this idea of verse mapping. So instead of just saying, Hey, I’m going to memorize these 10 verses in 10 days, it’s like, well, let’s just spend some time with this one verse, however long the Lord puts that on your heart and memorize that, but do a verse map. Can you kind of, I’ll link to the video that you did about this, but can you give us a short summary of what you mean by verse mapping?

Faith Womack:
Yeah. So verse mapping is basically, I typically tell people, do this whenever one verse sticks out to you when you’re reading through a chapter, a passage of the Bible. And so when you’re memorizing one particular verse, this would be a great time to verse map. And it’s basically just kind of breaking down the verse in its meaning. And you can do that by looking at the Greek or the Hebrew words one by one, but also by looking at the structure of the verse. So sometimes we know that when day four is at the beginning of a verse, we need to pay attention to why it’s there for, right? What’s it there

Josh Summers:
For? Yeah.

Faith Womack:
But can be a really pivotal change in that verse. There’s certain trigger words, especially in the Old Testament verses when there’s has said, which is the God’s loving kindness, pay attention to that word. Or there’s just all these different things that we can kind of see when we dial into one particular verse. Step one to verse wrapping though is context. Look at the big picture of what’s going on, because if we just verse map Jesus wept, we’re going to take it out of context. If we don’t pay attention to why he’s weeping and what he then does despite his weeping or after his weeping, that’s a big thing. Jesus did weep, but then he also raised Lazarus from the dead. And that informs the way we understand that verse of Jesus wept and how triggering it is. But then also after you look at context, you can look at other Bible translations and just read, oh, that’s really interesting that the n l t translated it that way.
That helps me understand it better. Or, I like the N K J B translation a little bit better, or whatever it is. I’m really big person about using different Bible translations for health to understand, to get a better picture. Because more often than not, it’s the same words that are just change translated differently because it’s a dynamic word in the original language. Because Greek, especially Hebrew, can have so many dynamic understandings behind that one word. It’s kind of like us using love in today. In English, we can mean so many different things between, I love fries to, I love my husband to, I love my children, all different types and forms of love that look different. And it’s the same kind of way with Bible translations. And so I encourage people to look at context and look at Bible translations, and then I use Bible Hub, which is a free website, and you can just type in whatever verse This is second Timothy one, five, so two Timothy, one, five Bible hub just on Google.
And Bible hub will give you an Interlinear Bible, which is the Greek, the Greek, and then the English or the Hebrew, and then the English with the Strongs concordance number. And you can look up the ways that it’s been translated, different cross-references of the same word in the same book. You can go really in depth when you look at just the Greek or the Hebrew behind the version that you have. And so that’s what we really focus on my channel. How can we go a little bit deeper and just understand the scriptures on just another level because it really does change you and because it’s really true, we want to really know ’em right and study. So anyway, I’m really passionate about verse mapping. I think it’s a great tool that more people should do. I mean, there’s definitely weak points and things that you don’t want to do when you’re verse mapping, but you don’t, that’s not a reason to not verse map.
I’d rather us make mistakes and learn and grow because it is a muscle to verse map. I actually meet every single week with my patrons, and we live real time verse map, a random verse from the YouVersion Bible app, whatever verse they that day we’re verse mapping it. And some weeks we learn about the importance of context. Other weeks, we learn about the importance of Bible translations. Other weeks we learn the importance of not taking the Greek word out of context, whatever it is. And anyway, so I’m a big, I love verse mapping. I think it can be really helpful for having scripture then affect our lives and truly understand it.

Josh Summers:
Yeah. That’s so cool. You said second Timothy one, five.

Faith Womack:
Yeah,

Josh Summers:
That’s the one where your grandmother, Lois and your mother unit. Why did you choose that?

Faith Womack:
Oh, man. Why?

Josh Summers:
Just because. Well, yeah, what was you thinking? So

Faith Womack:
Don’t get me crying here. No, you’re none. I mean, as a female, as a female, especially in conservative circles, it’s like you got Proverbs 31 and that’s it. And yet you see such amazing examples of the faith and the women behind them. And I pray that over my boys that they’ll say, well, I had a faithful mother who every day was discipling me in the faith. She didn’t skip a day. So I mean, that’s a pivotal verse that has shaped me as a mother and as a wife. And I was like, I want to memorize it and kind of chew on it for a hundred days. So this was one of the first ones that I memorized. But yeah, did I think I

Josh Summers:
S So, yeah, I love that. And I’m actually kind of embarrassed that for me, because memorized second Timothy, and I honestly just kind of tread over that verse, not lightly, but it doesn’t hit me the same or will now. But it was just, okay, you’re family. You had a godly family, but I see where you’re coming from, and now when I recite that verse, it’s going to have a different meaning. I think that’s one of the things that I love about memorization is that I have an anchor point, and so then when new understanding or when better, deeper understanding happens, I’ve got something to peg that onto as opposed to just hoping that it’s going to stick somewhere, like putting a sticky note on me. So thank you for that and for your emotion on that, because I will remember that from now on.

Faith Womack:
Wow. Yeah. I’m just so honored to be a part of this, and thank you for having me, Josh. And your audience seems like the coolest people that they are. Just wanting to memorize scripture the best way possible. I mean, kudos and what an encouragement to even just touch my toes into this community. It’s so cool.

Josh Summers:
Well, thank you, Faith. I really appreciate that. Thanks for taking the time with us.

Faith Womack:
Yeah, thank you for having me.

More Bible Memory Resources

Are you interested to memorize more of God’s Word? Check out the various resources we have available on Bible Memory Goal:

• Not sure where to start? Here are 52 verses to memorize in the Bible
• Want to join a community? We have a great Bible memory community here!
• Want to listen to more interviews? We have amazing Scripture memory interviews here!

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