It all started with the simple idea of a themed calendar. My mom, in the middle of chemo, asked me to help her put one together for the church one more time. She was not sure she would have another Christmas. Over the years she had filled them with favorite recipes, wedding photos, all kinds of themes. This time, we landed on prayer—twelve months, twelve focuses. While she slept that afternoon, my mind wandered somewhere I had not planned: what if each day had a verse of Scripture to go with it, so whoever used the calendar could pray in God’s own words. I grabbed a concordance and started looking. I submitted the proposal to a magazine for Christian women, and they asked me to finish it so they could publish it.
That summer, I was working on it at my dining room table when my sixteen-year-old son, Joshua, wandered in and asked what I was doing. I explained it, showed him what I had so far, and told him that it had gotten hard, and I wasn’t sure it was such a good idea anymore. He looked at me and said, “Mom, this is a great idea. You have to finish it.”
A couple of months later, the Lord called him home.
I had to finish that prayer calendar. For no other reason than he had believed in it. The magazine printed it in 2014, and asked for another the next year, and the year after that. When they asked for a calendar in 2017, I knew it had to come from the Psalms. My own grief had taken me there repeatedly, and I had noticed that the psalmists asked so many questions, page after page. I wrote them all down. But they didn’t just ask. They answered their own questions. They lamented, they begged, they remembered, they praised. I knew that lament. I felt their cries to the Lord, and I had sat with those same questions myself.
As I worked through the Psalms, I chose twelve questions, one for each month, and verses to go with each one. The magazine printed only the questions and the passages, but I knew there could be more. For nine years, I’ve been trying to find the right way to share how the Lord used the Psalms to comfort me. What I understand now, looking back, is that searching for those verses kept me in His word on the days my heart was resistant to spend time with Him. I had deadlines. I had to find the scriptures, read them, make sure they fit. He didn’t just walk with me through the grief. He gave me a reason to keep opening His word when I needed it the most.
A journal project has grown out of that searching. More on that soon.