So...I've been interested in the Puritans, but not real motivated. Our pastor highly recommended that we read Communion With God by John Owen, so I started doing the book study and was following the text really well, but not retaining.

This is going to be tedious, but a good exercise for me. I've taken a student through a segment of "Institutes for Excellence in Writing" and used the concepts with a couple of other students so I'm taking it for a test drive here.

The main idea is to pull key words from the text, step away for a few minutes and then rewrite the sentence using the *three* key words. For students with comprehension issues, this has been a lifesaver!

For the purposes here, with "Communion with God", just highlighting the key words has helped me.

My first issue is that Owen is, let's say...stingy...with paragraph breaks. My brain needs more breaks than that, so I'm taking them in chunks of just a few sentences.

I'm also trying to put the sentences in outline form, just so that I can better organize the thought process.

I'm using a study guide by Ryan McGraw (Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals - Meet the Puritans)

so...here we go.