March Musings and Lenten Readings

March came in like a lion and thus far has not yet decided if it wants to be a lamb. We've had some lamb-like days, and then the cold comes roaring back. Illness (my own, the sweet girl's, D's) has kept us all a little off kilter this month. Spring teaching work has also kicked in, and I've had way too many plates spinning. Hence the resounding quiet here!

In the midst of everything, the season of Lent has begun. When I'm on the ball (heh...it has been known to happen) I usually do a pre-Lenten post about my reading for the season. Although that didn't happen this year, I thought I would still post a few thoughts about my reading.

As a family, we're still moving our slow way through the Psalms. We've been reading one Psalm a night for the past few months. Actually we started in the middle -- the sweet girl was intrigued to have us read all the way through Psalm 119, the longest one, and once we did that, we just kept going straight through to the end of the Psalter. Once we got there, we decided to start back at the beginning, and we're now at Psalm 93, almost all the way back around.

We've been a Psalm-ish family for years. We tend to read through them based on the daily readings, but we're not always consistent about it. We also have favorites we've revisited, meditated on, or mostly learned by heart through the years. Psalms 8, 23, 84, and 103 all come to quickly to mind, and there have been others.

For the past couple of years, I've been feeling especially close to the Psalms -- they've lodged in my heart and prayers in new ways. I appreciate their raw, deep honesty, and the way they cover so much of life, the parts that make sense and the parts that don't. They keep me God-oriented. So I am especially happy this Lent to be reading N.T. Wright's The Case for the Psalms. It is not just a book about the Psalms, but an invitation to live them and pray them. I am finding it good, good tonic for the soul.