A note from Stacey – March 2017

Dear friends,

The season of Lent begins soon. Lent is the forty days from Ash Wednesday (March 1) to Easter, not counting the Sundays.

In the recent past, you may thought of lent as a time to “give up” something. Recently we have also begun to think about lent as a time to pay special attention to the work of God all around us – in our lives, in our communities, in our world. think about God’s values: peace, reconciliation, forgiveness, justice, and we ask ourselves whether our choices are what God would have us choose.

Lent begins on Ash Wed. with our confession of our weakness and failings -we experience God’s willingness to forgive us and make us right. Then we turn our thoughts to “taking on” rather than “giving up” for lent. on something new that will bring us closer to God, that will help us live more as God would have us live.

I invite you to think of what you can “take on” during lent to grow in your faith.

Do you need to deepen your faith by making a commitment to yourself to read your Bible or to pray every day? Would it help to join one of our study groups? During lent, communion will be offered every Sunday, after the postlude, to all who wish to renew their commitment in this way.

You may feel a need to reach out to another person. Perhaps a card or a letter or a phone call once a week to someone you know to be struggling. Perhaps a visit to a nursing home or an errand for an older person or someone who is sick. You could volunteer at our bike collection day on March 4 or bring a big bag of food every week to church on Sunday for the food pantry.

Perhaps you could “take on” an act of justice for lent. You could write a letter once a week to a government official – representative or senator, governor or president – to tell them why your faith helps you to see an issue in a particular way. Or maybe you feel you need to be more informed – you could read the newspapers carefully about an issue and become very informed about all the angles. You could select a country that’s in the news and learn about it and its people. Or how about redoubling your recycling and other efforts to be a good steward of the environment?

I invite you this lent to think about the things in your life that you need to give up or let go of – but I also invite you to deepen your faith by taking an action that will make you a stronger, more faithful follower of Jesus Christ.

In Christ,

Stacey