“It doesn’t take long to find light, to give thanks to God. I’m being reminded this Lent over and over again that God is a God of life, hope, and grace. A God who walked through the darkness so we would never have to do it alone. A God who continually makes all things new.”
“But ultimately it is God to whom we owe that bond. To be blunt, God made us, and God owns us. It is pure grace that we have the choice of making mistakes and learning and turning again toward our God.”
“Paying attention to the words that fall from the lips of God, refusing to tempt the Lord, and worshiping God only, serving God alone, are good rules to follow when we have power.”
“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.”
“We all fall. We all deny the Christ by word or deed or sheer carelessness. We are so human. We become afraid. But if we were not given the example of Peter, how would we learn? It was necessary for Peter to be afraid, to be human, to be flawed. And to ultimately receive Jesus’ forgiveness and mission to continue his teachings, to feed Jesus’ sheep, and build a Church, the Body of Christ.”
“There is a vast wealth of understanding we can take away from this Transfiguration story, enough that each time we engage with it, we will learn and grow. Today what I am hearing is that whatever I want to do, wherever I want to go, I ought to turn my attention to how God has engineered the experience as an opportunity to be known to me.”