Lent Invitation, No One Excluded

“We must believe that the stone will be rolled back, and we must be ready to poke out our timid heads, take off the linen bindings of death, and walk free for a time, breathing resurrection air.” – Ronald Rolheiser.

“Joy and sorrow. Love and loss. Big wins and even bigger failures. We cling tightly to the beautiful moments, but then the phone rings, a diagnosis drops, or some creeping ache reminds us that everything—everything—is so much more fragile than we’d like to admit. Life can be too much. And Lent is the season where we sit in that heaviness. For 40 days, we stop pretending things will suddenly get better and face the truth: life is fragile, and so are we.

Lent begins with Ash Wednesday, when we hear the words no one really wants to say out loud: you are dust, and to dust you shall return. It’s not exactly the kind of thing you’d embroider on a pillow, but it’s a truth we need. Lent invites us to stop pretending we can hold it all together and instead sit with the weight of what we carry—the grief, the regrets, the messes we can’t untangle, no matter how much we try.” – Kate Bowler

Lent is my favorite season
Winter to spring
Desert to oasis
No glitter, fluff, the real stuff of life
Honest, fueled with meaning and purpose in the waiting
Overflowing with hope on the journey, twists and turns too
Resurrection at the end of the journey, always
No shortcuts, so worth the trip
No one “owns” Lent so dare to take the journey
God has been diminished, defined, limited, and boxed by many
God is here for each one of us and loves us like there’s only one of us
So much bigger than our small minds can comprehend and imagine
Kate Bowler has a wonderful devotional guide on Lent –https://katebowler.com/seasonal_devotional/the-hardest-part/

Stone rolling and resurrection air ahead.

“This is the moment
we ask for the blessing
that lives within
the ancient ashes,
that makes its home
inside the soil of
this sacred earth.

So let us be marked
not for sorrow.
And let us be marked
not for shame.
Let us be marked
not for false humility
or for thinking
we are less
than we are

but for claiming
what God can do
within the dust,
within the dirt,
within the stuff
of which the world
is made,
and the stars that blaze
in our bones,
and the galaxies that spiral
inside the smudge
we bear.” – Jan Richardson