anyway, I like your reflections. Binders are a big part of UBF history/culture. I myself started keeping one from elementary school. It was very difficult to write reflections so I was proud of them and wanted to keep them safe and organized.

I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with keeping your notes organized for future reference or to keep track of progress. Writing itself is becoming a lost art form in today’s society. Not just writing, but the reflective kind seems especially foreign to many children. Recently, I read an article that notes taken on laptops in a college classroom are inferior to those taken by hand in terms of acquiring and retaining new information.

after 20+ years of writing my reflections, I can now say I enjoy writing them and they are a great way to understand myself, God’s message, and his love for me. Keyverse testimonies have been wonderful opportunities to set new goals and see God’s hand of guidance in my life and his answers to prayer. If binders are a way to save those precious moments with God and discoveries into his word, I don’t see any reason to feel ashamed or embarrassed about binders.

However, if they have become a means to show off or be recognized, or if you feel they hold the key to helping someone come to Christ or affecting change on a person, then it’s best to throw them away. People are inclined to look for a formula for all sorts of things, including faith in Christ. But there is no such formula especially when it comes to a person’s individual encounter with God. I once took down my Bible teacher’s words from Bible study down on paper and saved them in a binder because they were so life-changing for me. However when I repeated them to others, it gave them some new insight, but it was not as life-changing as it was for me. Since then I realized we cannot depend on past experience or our past notes to hold any water for any other person we come into contact with. Everything is personal according to the plan God has for each of us.

Note that UBF has many websites and even a museum devoted to the “heritage” of Samuel Lee. You would expect that his real writings would be archived and made available there. But that’s not the case. They don’t publish his newsletters and circulars, since it would reveal too clearly how warped his views were.

I once had a website with archives of UBF letters and testimonies of abuse, but then UBF lawyers threatended me with a lawsuit of 100.000 Euro amount in dispute for copyright violation, violation of privacy, libel etc. Though I would have possibly won the lawsuit, as a private person with a job and a family I don’t have the time and nerves to go through that, and cannot afford a legal protection insurance and expensive lawyers like UBF who were obviously paying them from offering money.

No worry though. We are working to get his content refined and republished :)

Not to brag or anything, but I likely have more, bigger and thicker binders than all of you combined (every week for 27 years!). :D

By learning/trying to see things GHF (instead of GHE), optimistically and positively (rather than pessimistically and negatively), I would simply say this:

“If not for 27 years of weekly testimony writing, I would not be the avid, passionate, enthusiastic, daily blogger that I am today.”

I can’t speak for others, but in the words of Francis Bacon, those years of writing (which continues to this day in a different form), have sharpened and enriched my life: http://www.ubfriends.org/2011/02/21/reading-discussing-writing/

“In Seoul we concentrated on studying the word of God. Each week we held a shepherds’ meeting. We listened to a Bible message, wrote Bible study reports – testimonies – and shared them. We also wrote Daily Bread freely. Each semester there was a Shepherds’ conference. At that time, there were too many shepherds for me to check all of their Daily Bread notes, so I collected their notebooks and weighed them. The shepherd whose notebook weighed the most got a prize and the one whose notebook weighed the least was punished.”

Another obligatory item was the datebook. Our color for these was black, not white. In the datebooks, we wrote our appointments for 1:1, the “prayer topics” we were given by our leaders and notes during SWS and fellowship meetings.

A UBF shepherd was always expected to have his datebook at hand. I remember how I once was bawled out heavily in front of all on a mission journey when I did not have that datebook at hand when our national director announced prayer topics.