{"id":33699,"date":"2025-04-25T12:43:24","date_gmt":"2025-04-25T17:43:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=33699"},"modified":"2025-04-24T20:44:57","modified_gmt":"2025-04-25T01:44:57","slug":"book-report-40-days-of-discovery-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2025\/04\/25\/book-report-40-days-of-discovery-2025\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: <i>40 Days of Discovery<\/i> (2025)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/bsgfx\/40daysofdiscovery.jpg\" width=\"200\" alt=\"Book cover\" align=\"right\" hspace=\"4\">This was the Lenten devotional from the church I attend for this year.  <em><a href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2024\/04\/02\/book-report-40-days-of-wisdom-2024\/\" target=\"_new\">40 Days of Wisdom<\/a><\/em> last year, the first time I&#8217;ve gone through a devotional almost in real time.  Or at least at the same time as everyone else, as I did not not attend a small group or anything.  Not that they were emphasized this year, perhaps as a result of the continued attendance decline with this particular church.<\/p>\n<p>At any rate, although I picked it up early in Lent, I really didn&#8217;t get started really reading it for many days.  The first daily devotion starts with the woman recounting the indecision that she felt when she was a girl at Disney World, and&#8230;. Well, gentle reader, I am a bad, bad man, for I still hold a little envy\/resentment\/outrage for people who grouse about things I never had or never can.  Just imagine how I seethe inside when someone over forty complains about having difficulties with their parents&#8211;you have to imagine, because I don&#8217;t outwardly make a show of my personal ire of this sort, especially not performatively, look-at-poor-me variety.  But these sorts of things get me up.  I mean, aside from trips up north for the weekend or holidays down south in St. Louis with my mother&#8217;s family, the only family vacation we ever took was when my mother, who must have scrimped and saved all year, brought us down to the Ozarks for a week.  Poor little me, but I did pick the book up and put it down many times when getting into the setup for the first devotional.<\/p>\n<p>So, yeah, well, it&#8217;s a devotional written by members of the congregation, although I do not recognize some of the names, including a fellow with the title Reverend.  They range from personal anecdotes as springboards to scriptural lessons to more earn\u00e8d pieces (such as the contributions by my beautiful wife).  They&#8217;re pretty quick to read, and if you&#8217;re not giving them serious daily contemplation, they&#8217;re pretty easy to forget as well.<\/p>\n<p>But I guess they&#8217;re more workbooks than things that are supposed to stick with you anyway.<\/p>\n<p>And, unfortunately, because I am the Master Chief of sinners, I&#8217;ll mostly remember the hard time I had with the first devotion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This was the Lenten devotional from the church I attend for this year. 40 Days of Wisdom last year, the first time I&#8217;ve gone through a devotional almost in real time. Or at least at the same time as everyone else, as I did not not attend a small group or anything. Not that they [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33699","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33699"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33699\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33701,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33699\/revisions\/33701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}