By:  Jana Greene

  It is Monday. Although rainy days and Mondays don’t always bring me down, there is a tendency to feel a sense of let-down on the first work day of the week.  Sunday mornings have eclipsed  Friday and Saturday nights as the highlight of my week these days, maybe because I’m getting older, but mostly because I attend a church I look forward to attending.  It is full of people like me: broken but crazy in love with Jesus.  The worship is wild and the message is radical, and I leave feeling….vibrant. .  Technicolor.  No matter how washed-out I felt as I took my seat in the sanctuary, I am renewed when I leave the building.

                But now it’s Monday.  I can already feel the monotony moving in…the ho-hum.

                In an effort to revive my enthusiasm, I picked up my Bible. In the interest…

By:  Jana Greene

My mother used to call it “petering out”.

“You’re always starting things without finishing them,” she would say.  “you just peter out.”

Oh, how hard I try not to “peter-out”!

I start out strong, and by ‘strong’, I mean obsessive-compulsively.  I gorge myself with information about any given pursuit, lunging into it with enthusiasm.  I will go the distance!

It makes no difference what the pursuit might be.  Below is an incomplete list of projects I have begun without finishing  (what…you expected a complete list?) :

Yoga:  This routine involved a DVD set in which I was to emulate the “poses” of unnaturally flexible people.  Thinking this excercise might be good for a tightly-wound person such as myself, I went all-out.  I bought the mats –  and, I am sorry to say – two pairs of spandex pants. (The mats are now rolled up decoratively under our living-room coffee…

 I originally wrote this piece for a collection of devotionals on the book of James that my church was compiling.  I hope it blesses you today 🙂

Jana Greene     

For the past several days of Vacation Bible School, the children were encouraged to bring their parents, grandparents and friends to this Sunday service.  Today, they would parade into the sanctuary, assemble in front of the altar and perform songs in culmination of all they had learned during the week.   To the delight of the congregation, they sing songs about God, of course, and about loving one another.   And just as many generations have sung before them, they often sing about the joy, joy, joy, joy down in their hearts and about being happy, so very happy.  The last verse of the song really gets them excited.

“And if the devil doesn’t like it, he can sit on a tack! OUCH!”