5 Ways to make Come Follow Me work for you this year!

Everyone is renewing those gym memberships, cleaning out their candy junk drawers, and color-coding their planners. That’s right, it’s New Year’s Resolution time!

You’re probably making some spiritual goals too, and more than likely they revolve around the Come Follow Me curriculum.

As I’ve run the @comefollowmestudy Instagram account for the past year, I’ve heard from people from all walks of life and the struggles they hit this past year with making it work for them.

So I’ve put together my 5 most popular tips on how to make Come Follow Me actually work for you this year!

1.  You don’t need to do this every day. Or you can. But you don’t have to.

Some of us LOVE making up new rules and schedules, so when Come Follow Me was introduced, we jumped into planning mode. Every morning at breakfast. Every night before prayers.

If studying the Come Follow Me scriptures has worked for your family every day, then YOU ROCK. KEEP GOING.

But if that didn’t work for you, try something else!

I have scoured the CFM Manual and all of the talks that introduced it in General Conference – there is literally NOTHING about using this every day.

Make it work for you and your family, no matter what that “schedule” looks like. Everything on Sundays. Everything for FHE. Random days of the week wherever you can squeeze it in.

It all works.

2. (This is especially for those moms out there) : Don’t forget YOUR study!

One little google search, and you can find blogs, products, and accounts for teaching weekly Come Follow Me lessons to your family (literally no shade being thrown – I LOVE many of these accounts!).

BUT are they coming at the expense of your personal study?

Are YOU learning from the scriptures each week?

Are YOU being spiritually fed?

This is actually literally the whole reason I started my @comefollowmestudy Instagram account last year. I saw how easy it could be to forget about our own STUDY.

I am a firm believer that when YOU (moms in particular) take your own time to study the assigned chapters and study in whatever way works for you, then the lessons you are learning will naturally spill over into your family. 

So make YOUR study a priority this year. You can’t pour from an empty cup, amiright??

3. This is NOT a college curriculum. No one is taking attendance.

Remember the good ol’ days, like a year-and-a-half ago, when you would miss church because you were sick or traveling and you DIDN’T GIVE A SECOND THOUGHT to “making up” the lesson you missed??

Some of us hear the word “curriculum” and jump right back into our school days. We miss a week for some reason, and then we spend the next few weeks trying to do the make up work, while trying to do the current work, while trying to keep an A+, while drowning in real life work too.

Can I give you permission to just let it go?

If you miss a week, or two, or three… then just start with wherever the curriculum is at when you start back up again.

I GUARANTEE you will not miss any life-changing doctrine that you will not find anywhere else if you do this.

And honestly, you’ll probably be able to still catch the same lessons you missed in a couple weeks. The gospel doctrines are super repetitive. Thank goodness.

4. JUST DO IT.

Alright, switching audiences for a hot second. If you’ve been reading these and thinking, “Uhhhh, I’m definitely not ‘overdoing it’. We pretty much never started in the first place.”

Then you are NOT ALONE!

Trust me, I’ve got the Instagram DMs to show that you are not alone.

If you’ve ever put your head down when there was ANOTHER Sacrament meeting all about Come Follow Me and thought, “This just doesn’t work for my family”, then now might be a good time to reflect for a second on why you might want to jump in.

All that this new curriculum does is give you assigned scriptures to study. Sure, there’s a manual with some guiding quotes and questions. But that part is not necessary. All you need to do is read the assigned chapters and study them in whatever way works for you. It’s just reading the scriptures! Only good things can come from this, I promise. 

It can be super awkward sometimes to start a new habit with your family, though, right?

But what if you just embraced it?!

“Hey fam, I know we never really started that Come Follow Me thing last year, but I know how important it is to study the scriptures. I would really like to make it more of a priority this year – any suggestions on how we can make this work for us?”

Bam. Just try it. 

Cuz Come Follow Me can be life changing.

5. The goal of everything in this church is to help us become more CHRISTLIKE.

Has your Come Follow Me study CHANGED you? 

This was also a huge guiding prompting that led me to start my @comefollowmestudy Insta account. 

Are we learning lessons from the scriptures and then applying them?

Cuz that’s the way we become more Christlike. 

It’s super fun to focus on the stories and the background info and the timelines sometimes, but at the end of the day, all that really matters is that we are learning spiritual lessons from what we read. 

In fact, even little toddlers can do this. Sure, it might be super engaging to act out Ammon cutting off arms. But a little child can also learn the importance of following spiritual promptings and notice that in their real life.

Bring it all back to the doctrine, and let it CHANGE you and your family. 

So, really, I think your spiritual goal should really be about becoming more CHRISTLIKE.

Any little goals relating to Come Follow Me should support your overarching goal to become more Christlike, and not be in a separate category. 

So here’s to looking forward to 2020 and jumping into the Book of Mormon! When we make our own personal study a priority and really let these scriptures change us, then we are doing exactly what we are supposed to be doing. 

Happy studying!
Cali Black @comefollowmestudy