Grace and Peace to you all! February 6th, AshWednesday, ushers us into a new season of life together as God’s people. The season of Lent will be upon us, and lead us through a 40 day season of preparation for Holy Week and Easter! Especially in an ecumenical congregation, Lent is many things…a time for focused prayer, worship, almsgiving, service, fasting, repentance, preparation, cleansing. But, the season of Lent is greater than the sum of these parts. It is most simply put, a journey. Our Scriptures teach us about the value and nature of this journey of faith through many lenses – Noah floating for 40 days, the Israelites wandering for 40 years, Jesus in the wilderness for 40 days. As a spiritual journey to discover what God was doing in their lives, they each made the journey. And along the way, each of them discovered something about God’s calling for their life.
Noah discovered something about living in God’s faithfulness. Moses discovered something about living out divine freedom. Jesus discovered the path for which he had been revealed. They each physically ended up in a different place – Noah on the side of a mountain across the sea, Moses in a new country, Jesus in a new town to begin his public ministry. Yes, during a divinely appointed season each of them went somewhere. But, more importantly, during the season, each of them became something.
Hans Christian Andersen wrote in “The Fairy Tale of My Life” that “to travel is to live”. And indeed, for someone who struggled to travel the short distance from Odense to Copenhagen in his youth, he ended up spending 18 years of his adult life traveling to places like Amsterdam, Austria, Germany, Holland, Italy, Morocco, Norway, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland, which in the mid 1800s was a tremendous feat. It was during this time that so many of his fairy tales came to life, and he truth as Andersen was blessed to see it, was recorded through the images of life that left an indelible mark on his view of the world. In a sense, H.C. Andersen was blessed to make the journey due to his fame and the wealth of friends. And in these years, he certainly went somewhere. But more importantly, during this season of his life, he became something. And children’s lives around the world are richer for it.
We live in a transient time, and as an international community, we experience travels more than most communities, whether our own one another’s. Spanning the globe brings great joys and discoveries, and it also brings great struggles with our time and energy. In all of our comings and goings, the next 40 days, the season of Lent will provide us with a divinely appointed season to make a spiritual journey. We have the opportunity to travel extra miles in prayer as a group focusing on Spiritual disciplines, groups gathered in Bible Study, service through our Refugee Service or the collection of clothes for the women’s shelter, youth meeting for fun and Christian education, each of us gathered together for worship and fellowship…all of these parts of our life exist to help us to make the spiritual journey. There is such value in making this journey, just like H.C. Andersen said, “to travel is to live”. In making this intentional spiritual journey, we come alive, and discover God’s still small voice calling us to follow.
Yes, for some of us, this faithful pursuit can be literally displacing. But for all of us, the Spirit is calling us to be transformed by the journey. This newsletter is packed with many opportunities to engage the journey during this month, and our congregation is packed with beautiful children of God to share the journey in faithful support. As we make the trip through this season, it is my prayer that, as a congregation as well as individually, we will not so much think about where we are going, but what we are becoming. And at the end of the journey, we can marvel at where we how far we have come.
May your Lent be blessed.
Peace,
Pastor Chad
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