Quiet Saturday

It's been raining. It's cold in this house. We have been napping this weekend. Now I'm up and just had a short quiet time.
I am using an Episcopalian daily lectionary included in a Lenten pamphlet sent me by a seminary. All the comments on the lectionary are done by seminary students. It's pretty good.
I have not used an Episcopal lectionary in several years. The Scripture Union daily readings I usually use just go through Bible books, usually alternating with Old Testament then New Testament. But I lost my quarterly book. I could use an email I get of the daily readings.
The Episcopal lectionary consists of an OT section, a NT section, a gospel section, and psalms. There are morning psalms and evening psalms and if you read them all you would read all the psalms every 3o days. Something like that.
So today I read psalms 23 and 27: The Lord is my shepherd and the Lord is my light and my salvation. As I morbidly think of death and mortality I am encouraged by the passage in 23 "though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will not fear because Thou God is with me." That speaks right to my brooding though it does not entirely relieve me. Death is real and serious. I will not be relieved of it.
The gospel, which the seminary student commented on, was Mark 5:1-20, the story of the Gerasene demoniac. God chose to heal this man, before he even asked. Then interestingly he talked to the demon(s) and allowed him a sort of compromise. What good it did the demons to live in drowned pigs I do not know. Perhaps the demons did not think about the reaction of the pigs when they entered them. The pigs went wild, but not in the way a human would.
But Jesus cared for this man. He did not seem to care about the reaction of the more "sane" in the region when their whole world was disrupted so wildly. The man they could count on to be wild was now clothed and sane. And a fortune in pigs was destroyed instead. They would probably have preferred things to stay as they had been.
I finished my quiet time by getting my Greek-English Bible and working through the Greek with of course lots of help from the English translation on the opposite page. That was interesting and helpful. There was at least one word play where the same word is used to refer to Jesus and to the healed man. I find it interesting that Mark refers to him as the demoniac even after he is healed. Perhaps that is a reflection on how the people of the region referred to him. Perhaps he would always be referred to as the "man with the evil spirit".
Jesus instructed him to stay there and tell everyone (evangelize) about the great thing the Lord had done for him and his mercy to him. That last part is probably what kept him from protesting. He knew that he had received a great mercy and that this would be his way of giving back to Jesus for what he had done.