Flunking Sainthood Every Day A Daily Devotional For The Rest Of Us Jana Riess by Jana Riess 9781612616735, 9781612614090, 1612616739, 1612614094 instant download after payment.

The kind response to my memoir Flunking Sainthood floored me, to be honest. It’s always uncomfortable to admit our disappointments and flaws in public, so to have that chronicle of repeated failure received with such grace has been a blessing. It seems there are a lot of us who are flunking sainthood—comrades-in-arms who have the courage to laugh at our shortcomings as we pick ourselves up to try, once again, to inch just a little closer to God.

Two recurring comments I’ve heard about Flunking Sainthood have prompted this companion devotional. The first is how much people loved the short quotations I sprinkled in the margins throughout the memoir. This delights me because I am a collector of quotations. I had been filling journals with them for years before I discovered that this is actually a long-standing devotional practice. (Who knew?) So the day-by-day compilation you’re holding is a sort of commonplace book, a gathering of very short snippets by some of my favorite writers.

The second comment has been that people are enthusiastic to try many of the spiritual practices I undertook in Flunking Sainthood. To this end, each month in this book is organized in the same order that the practices occurred in the memoir. January is an opening month that addresses the spiritual journey—and, in particular, how we handle our failure to be perfect Christians. After that, there are twelve different spiritual practices, from fasting (February—hey, it’s a short month) to generosity (December, just in time for the holidays). Note that June has two spiritual practices because I was so deficient with centering prayer that I wound up substituting the Jesus Prayer in the middle of that month.

Each day’s devotion features a question for reflection, a prayer, or a short action item to help you integrate the monthly theme into your life. These action items are not intended to be guilt-inducing; please don’t berate yourself if you only do some of them