Lenten Messages

Sometime, O God, my thirst for you is pushed aside, ignored, or simply quenched by something other—something reasonable, something more popular—than you. But you never go away, never stop, never leave the depths of me. Like an underground spring, you are fresh and free, breaking through. Help me prepare a place for you in the caverns of my soul. Amen.

- Pamela Hawkins
The Awkward Season: Prayers for Lent

Lenten Thoughts

Our culture tells us to seek a comfortable life with little risk. We are supposed to set goals, make plans and stick to them. We play it safe by staying in places and with people that we know well. We all seem so awfully busy trying to just keep up that we don’t have much time for out-of-the-ordinary requests, surprises or spontaneity. And who has time to even listen for where the voice of God is calling us?

But what are we missing out on when we don’t? What are we missing by not venturing into the unknown? To name a few, we are missing opportunities to assist a stranded stranger, eat meals with a new immigrant family, help a sick neighbor and converse with our enemies. Ultimately, we are missing out on opportunities to become more human.

-Jodi Beyeler, news bureau director, Goshen College. From Goshen College Lenten Devotions

Lenten Messages

The forty days of Lent celebrate the dismembering, disequilibrium, and dying that are preludes to the creative transformation of Eastertide. It is a season of being changed and emptied so that new life might come to birth in us and resurrection be found in us as well.

-Wendy Wright, The Rising

March Thoughts

When Jesus asserted that we should love our neighbors as ourselves, he was expressing once again the profound theological truth that our love for ourselves and for others is intimately connected in the intricate ecology of life. We cannot wisely love others until we know how to love ourselves — and do it! In the dynamic and interdependent fabric of life, our wholeness and well-being and the wholeness and well-being of others are indivisible. Indeed, we cannot achieve our vocation in life apart from one another.

- Bruce G. Epperly

Holy Adventure

We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature--trees, flowers, grass--grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence. We need silence to be able to touch souls.

-Mother Teresa