An Invitation to Our Lenten Journey

This coming week, we’ll be entering into the season of Lent, travelling together with the theme – Full to the Brim – an expansive Lent. We often think of Lent as a journey. We reflect on the journey of Jesus towards Holy Week, the cross, and then beyond that on into Resurrection. We turn to scripture and the stories of how the people experienced wilderness wandering, again and again. As we turn to the scriptures for this Lent, what we find are sacred texts brimming with a gospel of grace – God sustaining, liberating, welcoming, loving all God’s creation.

For our Lenten journey this year, we will draw on resources of image and word created by SanctifiedArt – a collective of artists in ministry embracing a diversity of voices. They offer these first words about our theme:

Full to the Brim is an invitation into a radically different Lent, into a full life. It’s an invitation to be authentically who you are, to counter scarcity mentality that capitalism, oppression, and hierarchy can plant inside of us. When we allow ourselves to be filled to the brim with God’s lavish love, that love spills over. It reaches beyond ourselves; like water, it rushes and flows touching everything in its path.

Here are a few questions for prayer as we begin this journey:

· What do you bring to this journey?

· Where are you feeling empty?

· Where do you hear the world’s lament?

Bringing all of who we are, we’ll open our hearts to the experience of God’s abundant, free-flowing grace, sustaining us on our Lenten journey, all the way into Resurrection.