Head On Into Lent

This content has been archived. It may no longer be relevant

This Lenten Season I am encouraging you to “Head-on Into Lent” – to find a way (even a small one) to exercise your faith.  You might deepen it or broaden it.  You might question an assumption you have made about how to feed your faith or try something new to engage it.  You might even begin with how you think about your faith.  Has it taken the shape of simply believing a series of propositions about Jesus, the Bible, or church?  Has your faith been characterized by stock labels like: I’m Lutheran, I go to church, I know God has it all taken care of?  Could you think of “faith” this way:
Faith is a living faith… is an inspired thing.
It makes our hearts leap and our blood pump with joy.
Faith is aspirational, as in “It calls us to aspire to more.”
Faith is like falling in love (as in My heart quickens every time I think God is touching my life).

A living faith urges and calls us forward.  It asks us to question what we have known, so that we might know anew.  A living faith seeks to be alive to God in our lives and alive to God’s activity in our connections to other people.  A living faith is like the sign of the cross: the vertical bar calling us to connect with the heart of God and the horizontal bar reminding us to bring that relationship into our connections with other people.

I read this phrase in a book recently, and it spoke to my sense of a living faith seeking to be alive in each daily encounter.
      “What I try to do in my interactions with  people more and more, is SLOW the moment down, to shuck some of the  pretense, for us all to land in the moment together.”
Michelle Obama  “Becoming”

This strikes me as an urging of faith, a desire to really connect with another and to lay aside the artificial order, the perfunctory nature of meeting, to move from transactional encounters (like “Hi, how are you?” as you pass in the halls) to a transformational connection (where we learn and share and interact meaningfully).  With just a bit of effort we can come to know each other better so that we grow personally and grow together.  You can see this in the Good Sam logo (left), where the paths come together and intersect – at the foot of the Cross.

Whatever you do to inspire your faith or to connect it with others, I wish you the blessings of God’s nearness in it all.

Peace in your journeying this Lenten Season,

Pastor Mitch