Year: 2020

“Lent is an opportunity for us to learn to pace ourselves, even if we fall every single day. It is a time of falling, picking ourselves up, and taking another step forward rather than going ten steps backward. It’s a time period in which we work to get to the end, and hopefully, when we do reach the end, we feel we have accomplished something, we have grown in some way, we have come to new understandings of things that were cloudy to us before.”

“What Anna couldn’t climb over, she worked around. When she met resistance from the YWCA to allow migrating black women to become members, she created African-American chapters of the YWCA.”

“The two lines that are drawn upon our foreheads with this dust are in the shape of a cross—reminding us of a love that never gives up on us, ever, that calls us to new life even as we remember our bodily mortality. It is on that cross that we are drawn straight into the open embrace of Jesus, with his arms outstretched upon that cross, showing us that Love Always Wins.”

“I offer this reflection by Tim Mathiessen (The Snow Leopard, p. 169, Penguin Books, copyright 1978) as consistent with Ash Wednesday, when the priest marks your forehead with ashes using the same cross that marked your forehead with oil at baptism, this time reflecting the transient nature of human existence. You are dust, and to dust you shall return. Absent grace, where is the meaning?”

“Lent begins tomorrow. Whether you’re ready or not, whether you remember or not, whether you believe or not, the season is opening its doors for you. With a wide welcome, hear the voice of God gently inviting you to know you are loved and to place your trust in God’s story.”