The Sunday before Palm Sunday.

Only two weeks to go to Easter! Every week the pews have been filling up as people remember that they have a religion and a place to go practice it. And that's good! Maybe a few will stick as long as Pentecost.

I thought I should do something positive for my faith during Lent, like read the entire Bible. At the rate I'm going I'll... start any day now.

Fortunately some brilliant writer has the TL;DR version of the Bible out on social media. You know my slogan: MSMSA (Make Social Media Social Again). Here it is so you, too, can say you read the Bible this Lent:

I want to thank whoever put this together, as it's the kind of idea I might have come up with for this blog but would not have executed so well.

Longtime readers, who by virtue of that have paid for sins, may know that I often try to do some Bible reading at Lent and Advent. One year I read all four Gospels; another, the Epistles. One Advent I read all the Psalms, another all of Isaiah. It was interesting, it was sometimes challenging, it was enlightening, and it was easier when I was taking the bus to work. I would read a lot on the bus.

Lately I've been relying on a Bible app that gives me a random chapter every morning and a biography of the saint of the day. It's been a means of looking at the parts of the Bible I might never have dared read before. I must confess, when some sections come up in the rotation -- like in Chronicles, with long lists of names, or Deuteronomy, with things measured and sorted for verse after verse by cubits -- I die a little inside. After that, a chapter from a Gospel or Epistle is like meeting an old friend in a strange town.

I must always bear in mind that the Bible is a history of a people, in addition to its many other purposes, and must by nature have these lists of names and laws and instructions. It's common to ancient histories. Heck, in Homer's Iliad he lists pretty much every schlub fighting for either side before he gets into the action, and then he tells us how each one of them died. The Jews were an even more literate and more meticulous people, so their histories are even more detailed.

Which means to me, modern reader? A lot of the Old Testament is a slog. I've been known to skim.

Maybe I should just say "We did the things" and be done with it.