Abide — User Guide

Abide is a calm, on-device toolset for hiding Scripture in your heart and keeping a prayer journal. Everything you write stays on your device. This guide explains how each part works — and, just as important, why a few things behave the way they do.

Overview

Abide has three pillars:

Memorization and Prayer are native on macOS and iPhone/iPad. Study is available in the app and on the web.

Memorization has two phases on purpose: an intensive learning phase to get a verse into your head, then a low-frequency reviewing phase to keep it there. Understanding that split explains most of how the app behaves.

Memorization

Cloze drills. “Cloze” (rhymes with froze) means fill-in-the-blank: Abide hides some of the verse’s words and you recall them. The percentage on a card is the fraction of words blanked out — 25%, 50%, 75%, 100% — not a score. Higher percent = harder.

Spaced repetition (SM-2). Once you know a verse, Abide schedules it to come back at growing intervals — a day, then several days, then weeks — so you review it just before you’d forget. Each review you rate Again / Hard / Good / Easy, and that rating adjusts when the verse returns.

Why a freshly-activated verse keeps coming back (this is not a bug). A card in the learning phase has no once-per-day limit. Abide keeps serving it within the same session, climbing 0 → 25 → 50 → 75 → 100%, and it only leaves the queue once you reach 100% and rate it Good or Easy. So if you add a verse, review it once, and expect it to disappear for the day — it won’t, and that’s by design. Only reviewing (spaced-repetition) cards are limited to once per day.

Glossary

Term What it means
Cloze Fill-in-the-blank recall. The % is the share of words hidden, not a grade.
Learning The first phase — cloze drills that repeat until the verse is solid.
Reviewing The second phase — spaced-repetition upkeep, at most once per day per card.
SRS / SM-2 “Spaced Repetition System”; SM-2 is the specific scheduling algorithm Abide uses.
Interval How many days until a reviewing card is due again.
Ease A per-card factor that grows/shrinks the interval based on how easily you recall it.
Backlog / Park The same “set aside” state under two labels. Park (in Library) moves an active card to the Backlog — out of the learning queue and off the review schedule until you activate it again.

What every Stats number counts

The Stats page summarizes your library. A few numbers are easy to misread:

Number What it counts
Total cards Every verse in your library across all states.
In learning (cloze) Cards in the learning phase, still being drilled.
Reviewing Cards that have graduated to spaced repetition.
Backlog Parked cards, excluded from both queues.
Due today Reviewing cards only that are scheduled for today.

The one that trips people up: “Due today” counts reviewing cards only. Learning cards have no due date, so they never add to it. That means Stats can say “Due today: 0” while the Review screen still has a card waiting — that card is a learning card, counted under “In learning (cloze)”. Zero due does not mean nothing to do; check the Review screen.

Prayer

Pray Today. Abide surfaces prayers on a cadence you choose (daily, weekly, or as-led) so you’re not scrolling a giant list. Mark a prayer prayed to advance it, or answered when God answers.

Requests. Each prayer can hold updates over time, a category, and an anchor verse. Mark a prayer Ongoing (a standing prayer that never “completes”). You can promote an anchor verse to a memorization card in one tap — pray it and learn it.

Filters. Status chips (All / Open / Ongoing / Answered / Archived) narrow the list; Archived is the only way back to soft-archived prayers.

Study

Open a passage and tap a verse to open its Study panel, which has four tabs:

About cross-references. These are curated links between verses. Abide’s come from OpenBible.info, whose data traces back to the public-domain Treasury of Scripture Knowledge plus crowd-sourced voting. That vote becomes a rank, so Abide can show you the strongest connections first rather than a flat list. Tap a cross-reference to preview the verse; tap again to collapse it.

The Original (Hebrew/Greek) tab

The Original tab shows an interlinear word list — every Greek or Hebrew word in the verse (Hebrew reads right-to-left), each with:

Field What it is Why it matters
Original word The actual Greek/Hebrew What the author actually wrote
Transliteration The word in English letters (e.g. agapē, logos) Say it / recognize it without reading the script
Gloss A short English meaning Quick “what does it mean”
Strong’s number A stable ID (G#### = Greek, H#### = Hebrew) Ties every occurrence of a word together

Tap a word to open a lexicon sheet with the fuller definition plus parsing/morphology (decoded readable — e.g. “verb, aorist, active”).

A beginner word-study workflow (no Greek required)

  1. Read the verse in ESV or KJV first — get the plain sense.
  2. Open Original; find the one or two words carrying the weight (usually the verb or a key noun — love, word, righteousness). Skip particles.
  3. Tap that word; read the gloss and full entry; note the Strong’s number.
  4. Check the parsing — tense and mood matter (a Greek aorist “did, once” vs a present “keeps on doing” can change a command).
  5. Compare occurrences — the same Strong’s number elsewhere is the same word (cross-references often reuse the key term).

The one trap: the word-study fallacy

Don’t assume a word carries all its possible meanings — or its English-derived meaning — in every verse. (The classic bad move: dynamis → “dynamite” → “explosive power.” It doesn’t mean that.) Context wins over the lexicon, always. Parsing and gloss inform the reading; they don’t override the sentence.

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Credits & attribution