The best devo BY FAR I’ve ever used for Lent is called Loved to Life by Ann Voscamp. I’m tee’ing it up again this year. I used to “give something up” for Lent until the year I got overly ambitious and gave up both Diet Coke AND red wine. It didn’t make me more spiritual - it just made me tired and grouchy. So I abandoned that practice. But the Lenten season I gained the most was about a dozen years ago when I learned Romans 8. One verse a day from that chapter throughout Lent - like stacking blocks. It was the right thing at the right time. Not sure my 60-something brain could ever tackle that much again, but it prepared me for a hard season I didn’t know was coming.

As a child, it was my maternal grandmother. I spent many nights at her house - curled up next to her in a twin bed. She taught me to read by lamplight long before I was old enough to learn. She did it by reading to me from two sources: Reader’s Digest Magazine and the King James Bible. Not a day goes by that I don’t think of her.

Outside - preferably on a hiking trail - away from crowds and screens and city noise. It reminds me that if God can provide everything the earth needs to keep spinning, He can surely provide what I need to keep moving forward.