It’s been a good week. It’s always a good week when a new book comes out. It’s like having a baby. Lots of preparation. If you’re lucky, lots of people help. You’re exhausted by the end. You don’t know exactly what the book or the baby will look like, feel like. But then the baby arrives; the box is opened; a new creation has been born. You’re still tired, but happy, excited; life is good.

That’s the way it is here this week. The idea of a book of women’s meditations was hatched a couple of years ago by

Dick Schmidt, publisher and editor of Forward Movement. We contacted women we knew in the church to be good writers and put out a nationwide call for contributions.

We asked these questions: What about your perspective is unique from a woman’s point of view? In the little things and the big things — childbirth, middle-age, death, life with rebellious children, with well-behaved children, with the dissolution of relationships, in relationships that last, in play, in beauty, where is God and how has God touched you, blessed you, freed you, and brought you closer? Where is the Holy Spirit in the questions that have been answered for you and the ones left open? Where has God healed you? Where are you experiencing brokenness? Is God still present?

A year later, forty women are in print. And just like the women in the Bible and in The Scarlet Cord: Conversations with God’s Chosen Women, these contemporary voices deserve to be heard. Sparked and stirred by God, they have answered a voice more important than any other: the call of the Holy Spirit.

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Check back Sunday, Palm Sunday, and then every day next week for a daily thought on women who surrounded Jesus the last week of his life.

In the meantime, have a blessed Lent. I’m off to work with 150 awesome kids for three days at St. Stephen’s, Edina, Minnesota. Lots of energy at that age!