“Build Your Ark Before It Rains” with Entrepreneur Jill Donovan

If you wait until you need to recall Scripture, it’s already too late. Author and speaker Jill Donovan shares an amazing story of how God called her to memorize Scripture in order to prepare her to walk through a difficult season of life.

More about Jill Donovan:

• Personal Blog: https://jilldonovan.com/
• Official Business website: https://www.rusticcuff.com/

Jill Donovan Interview Transcript

Jill Donovan:
So when I was nine, my dream was to be an Olympic gymnast, and that’s all I did. That was my five days a week thing. And right before I turned 10, my coach pulled me aside and he said, Jill, I know what your dream is. I think you need to find another dream. This is just, you’re not built, you’re not flexible enough. This is not going to be you. And I think deep inside, I probably knew that, but I went home crushed. And I remember at nine years old saying, if I can’t be an Olympic gymnast and focused my whole life on that, then I’m going to start on January 1st, which my birthday’s the first week of the year. When I turn 10, I sound really mature, but it wasn’t, wasn’t that mature. I’m going to do a new hobby every year, 365 days, focus on one thing, and then at the end of the year I’ll say, okay, is this what I’m called to do?
And I did that every single year. I couldn’t wait. And at the end of the year, I’d have some sort of recital, a sort, some sort of ending to that hobby. And it has been 43 years of straight hobbies. And really, I wish they made all kids do that, because it doesn’t matter what your profession is, you become so much more well-rounded because you’ve done so many, a variety of things. And I mean, Josh, it was one year I took up ice skating for a whole year. I was 2027, I played the harmonica for one full year. I learned, this is silly, but I learned magic for one year. Like Christian Magic

Josh Summers:
Right. Yeah. It’s not really card trick magic. Yeah.

Jill Donovan:
Yeah. You name it. Whatever hobby you can think of. A one year, I played Texas Holden for a whole year. I learned and I traveled and I was Christian, Texas Holden. And that’s the thing, one year I read every book that had been that year, a Nobel Peace Prize, a Nobel, sorry, a Nobel Prize winning book for the year before. Wow. But I mean, I became just this reader. I mean, it didn’t matter what, I just had these goals every single year, and that’s what led me to want to the Bible memory thing. But it was it. Yeah. And I still do it. I’m this, I still, and I get so excited to have this one thing, and a lot of times it’s not like I drop it at the end of the year. It just keeps building up each year. So anyhow,

Josh Summers:
So bring us back a few years then ago where you did decide, if I remember right, was you had initially planned to just memorize what, two famous people’s birthdays and an historical event or something like that. But that morphed into something else.

Jill Donovan:
So I had, I was hospitalized for eight days, and when I got out at the end of the year, back in 2020, and when I got out of the hospital, I remember thinking, why are simple words that I’ve known my whole life escaping me when I need them? Something is different with my memory. And so I started to research at the end of the year, what can I do this next year as a hobby, as a goal to sharpen my mind. And as I researched, there’s a lot of different things you can do for mental exercises, crossword puzzles, all kinds of things. But memory was the thing, lifting weights. And I decided I’ll memorize one or two famous people’s birthday every single day and one historical event. And that way when I would meet somebody new, instead of saying, Hey, what do you do for a living?
I would say, when’s your birthday? And then we would connect on a whole different level. I could tell them what happened on their birthday. It was just kind of a neat thing. But at the end of the year, that means I would’ve had close to a thousand different things memorized. Well, on day 20 or 22, I felt like the Lord said, I want you to add a Bible verse every day to what you’re doing. To which I said, but that’s what the Bible app is for. Why do I need, I’ve got the Bible app, I can do that. And I felt very strongly that I was supposed to not really understanding at that time in January, why? And so I started to do this one verse a day, and I was randomly picking verses and I, okay, I had didn’t know. I just started looking up best 50 verses to memorize. And that is where this journey began.

Josh Summers:
And if I remember right, you started with one verse a day, but you started enjoying that so much, it became more than one verse a day. Right.

Jill Donovan:
So I grew up in a Jewish home. My mom and dad are Jewish. So it was all you in our family, old Testament. Long story short, my mom met the Lord Pat Boone, which you might be too young if Pat Boone. So he took her through the Old Testament and led her to the Lord. And then she got such a hunger for the Bible that she would split the Bible. She had five books of the Bible in one book, five another book. And she would read through the Bible many times in a year. And watching her do that gave me a hunger to do that. But never memorizing, just reading. And the Bible became her, my parents’ life and then my life. And as I began to memorize the scripture, I became, this might not be the best word, but obsessed with then memorizing three a day. And then I found you and you were doing chapters. And I thought,

Josh Summers:
Not a day, just so that we’re clear,

Jill Donovan:
Is it he is living overseas, that he can memorize a chapter a day? How does he do that? But I became so inspired thinking if you could do it, and even though I didn’t know you well, that why can’t I try this? So if you’ve ever felt the Lord call you to do something, he brings along with it such an urgency that you can’t ignore it, even if you don’t know the why behind it. Just it was this pull to do it without full understanding. And as the days and months, weeks and months went by, I spent so much time, I would come into my office and spend the first two or three hours with the door shut. And everybody knew my door was shut. I was in here, and I wouldn’t come out until I had reached my goal for that day. And I told you, when the Lord asks you to build an ark, you better do it before it rains, even if you’ve never seen rain. And that is what happened. He was preparing me for something later in the year that I had no idea. And boy, I am so glad that I obeyed, even though I don’t always do it. Absolutely very quickly this time I happen too.

Josh Summers:
So you had 10 months of spending time just very intentionally memorizing the word. And then I believe in October of 2021, you received a call. Yep. That changed a lot for you. Tell me what was said on that call and how did that affect you?

Jill Donovan:
So it was in October, and I went for my annual mammogram and never ever had any issues, no breast cancer in my family. And I got the call that they found breast cancer, a tumor, and wasn’t super small. And the thing that is paralyzing, the news that is paralyzing, that would’ve put me in some corner and just given up because I had so much word in me, I immediately went to what was inside of me instead of what everybody was saying on the outside. There was so much in there that I could pull up instead of having to go find and write down a bunch of things so I could try to memorize, then it was already in me. So everything that was coming out of me was not fear. It was so, it was this strong foundation of what does the Lord say for how to walk through this? Yeah.

Josh Summers:
I know scripture talks about how the Holy Spirit can bring to remembrance, but how can we remember something that we never knew or we never memorized in the first place? And I think I’ve been drawn, even from the first time that you and I interacted that idea, and I want to just say it again because I think it’s so powerful to build the boat before it starts to rain. Is that something you’ve come out of, I assume now in remission? Is that correct?

Jill Donovan:
Yes. Or just on the other side of it? Yeah. Yeah. I went through

Josh Summers:
Treatment on the side. Yeah. I don’t know

Jill Donovan:
How two surgeries and then treatment. And even during treatment, I would lay there getting radiation and chapters of Psalms. It’s all I would do while I was getting treatment. And to the point where when all the treatments were over, I thought, I just need to lay down every day I’m getting treatment. Because it was the discipline of just saying these, and it changes it. I mean, it changes your life. You, you know that. But it changes your day, like the day to day things. I’m sorry, I interrupted you.

Josh Summers:
No, no, no. That’s beautiful. I completely understand where you’re coming from. And even coming on the other side of that mountain, do you still feel this sense of, Hey, I, I’m, I still need to prepare even though I don’t know what it is that that’s ahead of me. You know what I mean?

Jill Donovan:
When you’ve had the urgency to prepare for things in your past, you recognize that feeling in the present for the future. And yeah, you remember it’s somewhere in your mental files. You remember how glad you were that you had prepared for it. And yes, I still feel that urgency so much so that it wasn’t like I memorized and thought, okay, I’m good for now. Mean.

Josh Summers:
Yeah.

Jill Donovan:
The crazy part is that I now want to do it even more than I did back then. And it’s not like I think there’s going to be another flood. It’s just that, yeah, I know the benefits regardless of whether I get a diag any a diagnosis or anything. Because just in my daily interactions with the people that I work with, I find that the words that are coming out of my mouth, because I’m still memorizing, are different than they were two or three years ago. My default now is the word of God instead of what is the, instead of the world’s word. So the urgency that I have is, it’s probably not, hopefully not for something I went through, it feels like the urgency I have is more now to pass on hope and to impact people in a different way. And so after I went through all the randomly, let’s, let’s pick out different verses or memorizing James one and two and three.
I just thought, I’m going to memorize every psalm, every single psalm, because it just felt, because I love the Psalms, first of all, and it felt like I was just memorizing poems. And yeah, I just think people always say, Josh can do that. Jill can do that. There’s no way I can do that. And I am one of those people that I do not remember what I had for breakfast this morning. I just, it’s not like I have a great memory, but when you purpose to do it, it’s a different story. What do you, you can say every song that Coldplay sings because you listen to the music all the time, which is great. And so you know that you can do that. It’s just what are you purposing to do? And you can’t just live for today, you have to live for what is God going to, what is he preparing you today for the future? I want to be prepared when something comes my way.

Josh Summers:
Exactly. No, I’ve heard it said that it, it’s like, it’s thinking of it like an investment. If you knew that you could invest in something right now, that what a hundred x in a few years? I mean, I’d put all my money in it if it was guaranteed. And it’s kind of that same way with scripture where we’re guaranteed that it will produce fruit in some way. And so it doesn’t make sense not to want to really put that passion and effort into it. So from a practical perspective, I like to just ask people this, and the answers are all over the board, but when you are approaching the Psalms, for example, yeah, you’re, let’s say you’re going through the Psalms. Is this something where you’re just repeating it over and over again? Do you have any kind of methodology? What is it that you do when you approach the Psalms?

Jill Donovan:
So I did it in the same way that I approached memorizing a historical event for every day. I was just, okay, memorizing it over and over. But the way that I look at it is I had this plate on my head and it’s got the arcade game with all the pennies, remember? And eventually pennies fall off. You’re trying to get, I don’t even remember how the game goes, but I just remember pennies falling off. It’s like, I have enough information on my head and by day 23, something’s going to fall off. And so I spent a weekend researching. I can’t do just rote memorization. I have too much information swirling around in my head. It is at some point something has to give. And I learned, and I know this method, and you may use this, how to anchor every single verse to a location.
So for example, when I’m memorizing, say Psalm 27, that chapter is, it’s silly. I pick a place, but that chapter is at the animal kingdom at Disney World, because I’ve been there. I mean, I’ve gone to Disney over the years, and it’s a place that I have to know really well. And so all those verses, every verse, the first one starts at before this ride I love, and then the second verse is standing in line for the ride. The third verse is when I’m talking to the person that lets me on the ride. So everything is anchored in a location, and that is how I can go through the whole Psalm 27 of mine, because I see myself going on this entire ride, getting off the ride, walking out, because it’s like I’m telling a story. There’s no way I would be able to memorize more than one or two chapters just by having it try to stay in my mind. It would drop off at some point.

Josh Summers:
That spatial awareness of our brains is phenomenal. It’s surprising to me the fact that I can remember the house that I grew up in and I could walk through that in my mind’s eye. And you’re doing that same thing with Disney World or Epcot or whatever theme park that you’re in, and using that to anchor those different points in the verse. And is that something that, you know, review every once in a while? How do you go about reviewing those then?

Jill Donovan:
So practically speaking, I wanted to memorize a 150 chapters of Psalm. So I set out to memorize one chapter a week, and I looked up the shortest chapters of Psalms. I wanted to give myself the feel good, like, okay, it’s an easy wins. Yeah, I didn’t want to start with Psalm one 19. And so I found that if, let’s say the chapter has seven verses, I would do one verse a day. By the time you get to the seventh verse, you know, keep saying one, two, you keep building on it, but the seventh, sixth and seventh, they kind of drop off because you’ve done 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. And so when I go to the second week, that week now is my new chapter, but every single day I have to review the first one. This is a way that I get the scripture really grounded and memorize.
Every time I memorize a verse a day, I go to a commentary that I love and I have to understand what that verse means. Because if I am just memorizing and have zero understanding of what was he trying to say or what’s the context, then it just feels, which is still great to memorize the word, but I need to know what was his heart posture when he wrote this? Where was he? Was he hiding from someone? Was he repentant? And when I understand that in the context of what he was saying, it is as it comes out of me, I’m feeling it instead of just saying it from my mind. And practically speaking, now I think I’m up to 50, almost 50 psalms. So practically speaking, I do six to seven, eight different ones a day. So on my way to the office this morning, today was Psalm, Psalm 20, 23, 24, 27, 29, and 34.
And those are the ones that I had picked I, and as I know that that is my Wednesday, that’s what I do on Wednesday. And then as I add another chapter a week, that one gets added somewhere in the week, this would not happen if I spent two minutes a day doing it. It just doesn’t, like we all have the same 24 hours. Am I going to choose to spend 20 minutes doing something that won’t have any effect on my future, or do I want to spend time sitting here and I actually take my pen and I just, as I’m memorizing it, I picture myself in that location and I just kind of draw it out. It’s really hard sometimes without a notebook or a journal. I need to see, see the picture and write it down. If I didn’t review, it would absolutely drop off.
I still have to review. Oh, 100%. I mean, you know that because you’ve done so many chapters if you’re not reviewing, and really if I take three weeks off of reviewing something, it’s like, okay, come on back. Come on back. So review is everything. Yeah. I mean I, I’ve played the piano since I was young, and I know that I don’t want to just play it until I get it right. I want to do it where I just don’t get it wrong. I want to play it to where I can’t mess up. And that’s the same with the scripture. Yeah, I want to do it where if I am in prison, I tell all my friends, if you go to prison, you want me with you in the end times. If we’re all in prison, you want me in your cell because it’s so in me right now that I can’t get it wrong because I’ve been intentional about reviewing.
And people will say, I just don’t have time to do that, and I get it. But we make review the day and can you take 15 minutes? And people don’t have to memorize chapters. Let’s just start with a verse. Let’s start with, and I bring my whole team together and I write on a board. I draw out the picture of it because when they see the picture, then as their home trying to memorize, they remember the picture that I drew on the board as high as the heavens are, and I draw the heavens and then I draw the east and the west. And then that’s how, if they’ve never seen that scripture, that’s what comes to their mind. So lots of different methods. I’m obsessed with learning other people’s different methods though as well.

Josh Summers:
Oh, you and me both. I mean, that’s the whole reason I even have this podcast is I love even just hearing how you go about doing this and how other people, and I love stealing other people’s methods and kind of adopting some of those

Jill Donovan:
Things. There is one more thing that I do, and I do this because I’m, I driving back and forth to home and different places I go. I tape myself. I record myself saying the chapter I’m memorizing. And so when I get in the car, I just, not that I need to listen to me, but it’s my voice saying it. And I can’t read while I’m driving. And so I listen over and over to myself saying it because, and sometimes I mess up on purpose as I’m recording it, because then when I’m saying it as I am memorizing it, somehow I remember the part where I fumbled more and I, I memorized that part even more because I was just, it’s just some idiosyncrasy things. It’s just like, it’s strange, but it works for me to record myself and listen to it over and over again instead of just from the Bible app.

Josh Summers:
Yeah, no, I think there is something about the way that we have inflection or the way that we would read a passage that when you’re recording it yourself, it makes a

Jill Donovan:
Difference. Yeah. But it really, Josh, it has changed it the way that I live. And I’ve always had joy. I mean, I’ve always been a joyful person, but I think it’s changed the piece that I have when I look at the life of David and what he went through. And I stand back and I look and it’s inside of me now. I think somehow with a greater understanding from having memorized and studied each scripture, it changes how I look at any situation in any room I walk into and how I talk to other people and how I talk to God and how I pray. And I just get so excited, which is why I loved finding you, because there are very few that I can find that are as passionate about it as you are.

Josh Summers:
Well, thank you. I think you’re better known, I should say, for Rustic Cuff, which is the company that you started over, I believe 150 employees. This is not a small company, well known all across Oklahoma and the United States for that. You’re a speaker, you’re an author. I also know that you just had a daughter who graduated. And so I’m curious for you, the experiences that you’ve had in building a business and memorizing scripture and going through something like breast cancer. What are the things that you most wanted to pass along to your daughter as she is leaving the house and going out on her own and making her own

Jill Donovan:
Way? Yeah. Well, first it’s a whole different world raising a teenager than, I mean, it is,

Josh Summers:
Don’t tell me that. Don’t, I’m not there yet.

Jill Donovan:
They will listen to you to a certain point. Absolutely. In the same way that I listened to my mom and I, the way that I communicate with her can’t be in scripture form, even though though, yeah, I sort of take the scripture and break it down so she can apply it. But I think she has seen me walk through things in life and she knows that my go-to is the word. And now I have watched her as she just graduated high school. She’s in Boston for the summer, and she has called me and she wants to talk to me and my husband as well. But she knows that I’m going to give her the word, not just something from my mind because I’m just feeling it. It’s going to be based in the word. And that comes just from her having watched me walk through those things.
But raising children and teenagers is not for the week at all. It is definitely not for the week, but we always say, I’m going to do things differently than my parents and I’m not going to. And we wind up doing the same things that our parents did. And I know that because I’ve watched my mom and my dad, and I’ve watched my brothers and how you morph into this newer, maybe better version of your parents. And that is what I want to be a great version. So as my kids grow up and morph into something, let it be some better version of what we have done.

Josh Summers:
It sounds to me, and I am by God’s grace able to say something very similar, that you had at least a parent, if not parents, that set. Yes. That good example for you. And I had the same thing, and the best thing I can hope for and the thing that I pray is that I can set that same example for my boys in my case. And for you, it sounds like you’ve been able to do that same thing, especially, and this is through the trials that we go through. I think that’s where they get to see more than anything else what our priorities really are. When they see me go through that trial or when they see you go through having to go through breast cancer, the way that you handle that speaks louder than any scripture you might say to them as they’re leaving to go off to college or something like that. And that, that’s my hope as I raise my boys, is that they can see not just the fact that I enjoy doing this, but even in the hard times, as you said, I’m building that ship before the rain comes because they’ve seen me in the rain and it’s, yeah, going to come again at some

Jill Donovan:
Point. And I would say to them, what’s your go-to? Because they’re, they’re not going to learn until they go through their own trials. They’re not going to learn in the same way we learn. And I want their go-to. Yeah, whatever age they’re, whether they’re five, 10, or 25, if they saw that my go-to was the Lord, then they begin to pattern their go-to. But if they saw my go-to was worry and fear and what the world is saying, well, that becomes their go-to. So a go-to is a really, really big thing watching my daughter in Boston. And she knows not a single soul there right now. She’s at a summer program, and when she calls me, I say, I don’t want the play by play. I just want the end of the day or the end of the week because up and down, up and down.
But during the day, who is your go-to if I’m not there? Who’s your go-to? Is it the word? And it is only the word. If you have had some sort of watched somebody else pattern their life after that. So that’s what I want. And Josh, yeah, it’s a discipline. Do you, you know how much I would love to, yeah. Oh, I like to just sit and do my arts and graphs and watch tv. I enjoy that because working here, even though it’s with so many of my best friends, it’s still running a business is also, it is time consuming mentally, emotionally, in every way. Yes. But now I know can’t, not in my free time, I can’t not get the word inside of me. And I know the people that you said that are listening to this, they, they’re probably have already, they’re already on some sort of journey or else they wouldn’t be watching this, or they want to be on a journey.
And it’s like, how do you run a marathon? You don’t go out and run five miles. You just put your tennis shoes on. You just like that’s you put your tennis shoes on and walk to the end of the driveway. So how do you memorize scripture? Take one scripture and say, I got a month. If you give yourself more margin month and memorize that, because then that win will be added to the next scripture that you do and me, you’ll begin to hunger and thirst for more than you did the week before. So if somebody’s watching this and feels compelled to just start with putting their tennis shoes on and walking to the end of the driveway, if you feel compelled to do it, but don’t know why, you’ll be thrilled you did When you get to the why, because the why doesn’t have to be breast cancer. The why can be something really wonderful that you may miss out on if you didn’t start to get the word in it.

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:

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