For most who observe it, Lent is typically a season of fasting. People stop eating chocolate or watching TV or using Facebook.
Then there’s Margaret Feinberg. She’s decided for this Lent season to give up prayer.
Well, that’s a touch misleading. I’ll let her clarify… Continue reading
It’s the first Sunday of Lent ’11. Here is a prayer from a great resource titled “A Guide to Prayer for Ministers and Other Servants”:
Almighty God, you who call me to prayer, and who offer yourself to all who seek you face, pour out your Holy Spirit upon me today and deliver me from coldness of heart, a wandering mind, and wrongful desire. By the power of your spirit place within me steadfast love and devotion, so that today I may worship and serve you with all of my life; through Jesus Christ my Lord. Amen.
Late have I loved you…
A phrase made famous by Augustine as he expressed his regret at his own slowness in responding to the God who had always been seeking and tracking him.
It’s also the title of this fantastic song by Michael Gungor. A great Lent meditation for this fellow. Lyrics are below.
The following post came from Scot McKnight’s great blog…
Jeff Cook, author of Seven: The Deadly Sins and the Beatitudes , has offered some brief meditations for us to ponder during Lent this year. Continue reading
I’ve never attended an Ash Wednesday service.
However, if I did, I wouldn’t sit idly when the procession toward the front began. I might feel weird, but I would definitely join in. I would let the priest use his ash-coated finger to trace the cross on my forehead. And I would walk through my day marked with it. I’d let it smudge and fade until my evening shower finished it off.
And the point would be?
It would be found in the words almost certainly spoken by the ash-writer as the cross took its place on my forehead: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return.” The heart of Lent is seen in dust and ashes–that we are creaturely mortal and morally culpable. Finite and sinful, destined to die. And the blending of my dust-skin with those dust-ashes would drive home a point…
If I am to live, it will only be through the eternal God’s redemption of my fading self. A realization like that drives one quite naturally to humility and repentance.
And at that point, one has arrived squarely at the season of Lent.