Will, Adam, and several others have started new blogs focusing on reading the Bible through during the next year. It’s a great idea which I commend highly.
As I have been thinking about my own life with God I am recogniing the need for more structure. Like many of us I continue to find myself pulled by the needs of family and ministry and letting my devotional life slide. I need to relearn how to pray, and it seems to me that a good starting point for that task is to focus on the Psalms during the next year.
In his introduction to the Psalms in The Message, Eugene Peterson writes:
Most Christians for most of the Christian centuries have learned to pray by praying the Psalms. The Hebrews, with several centuries of a head start in matters of prayer and worship, provided us this prayer book that gives us a language adequate for responding to the God who speaks to us.
It seems to me that those of us who long for authenticity in worship and who hope that the church will focus on honesty and transparency should immerse ourselves in the Psalms. The Psalms are perhaps the most authentic and transparent expressions of pathos in the scriptures. The move us from high moments of praise the deep anger and lament in just a few short verses. Good poetry has the power to move our hearts, and the Psalmists were good poets.
While I could follow the leader and start a separate blog for my brooding and ruminations, I already have too many blogs that I am administering, so I will keep it simple and reflect here, much like I’m doing with the Liturgical Connections series of posts. One of the great frustrations of using blogger is that there isn’t any categorization of posts, but if you are like me I read everything y’all write anyway so it really wouldn’t be that helpful anyway.
Y’all feel free to follow along with me on this journey, okay?
Only Wonder Understands 