Meet Samuel Woman

Yesterday Portia and Babs were out for the afternoon visiting friends who were also home for the holidays and I stayed home waiting for a service call. So I thought it was a good time to get some work done on the devotions I promised to write for the RevGalBlogPals next book, Ordinary Time.

Yikes! I realized that I had written 1 1/2 devotions and had 6 1/2 to go--and they are due by January 30 which is when I'll be busy trying to get off to the annual Presby conference for Educators. In mid-January we'll be launching a new midweek discipleship program at church that grew out of our Alpha and Bible in 90 Days classes. So I realized that I'd better get going and finish these.

Like our Advent book, A Light Blazes in the Darkness (see sidebar), the devotions are based on the lectionary readings for each day. The days I volunteered for were based on a random selection of dates that were significant to me (family birthdays) and trying for a balance between Old and New Testament readings. Methodically, I decided to work on them in order of date.

That meant that I spent most of yesterday working on two lengthy passages from Samuel. Unlike the Advent readings which had a different one for each day, I had one scripture linked with two days, so I had to figure out how to divide the scripture which was a tricky task.

Samuel is one of the history books, which is fine with me because as a history major I'm more comfortable with these books than some of the others--like the wisdom and prophecy books. Still, four devotions based on Samuel is quite the immersion experience. It was fun discovering some contemporary allusions in these stories. For example, I saw God whapping the prophet Nathan upside the head for being King David's "yes man" and Samuel conducting a modern day political "beauty contest" with the sons of Jesse. Hope I'm not too far off base. I'm going to let them rest while I work on the other four.

For now, just call me Samuel Woman!