Lent Week Six

"Prayer is not asking.  Prayer is putting oneself in the hands of God, at His disposition, and listening to His voice in the depths of our hearts."  Mother Teresa

Six weeks ago was Ash Wednesday.  The ashes are no longer buried under my fingernails.  Haven't been there in a while.  Gone are the days when Lent crawled by.  This year it sprinted.  It ran like something was chasing it...(maybe Donald Trump was after Lent, too).

I'm not sure if I've changed much since the Wednesday of six weeks ago.  Have you?  My mind races today, too.  Scattered and jumbled like the pieces of a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle.  Like those annoying puzzles where the majority of pieces are slightly different shades of ocean blue; it seems near impossible to ever find two that fit together, let alone 683.

What has this season done for me?  For us?  For our churches?  For our communities?  For our world?  Do we even really know....or care.....or really, and I mean, really pay attention?  It's fun and easy to see the tiny purple flowers budding on the trees.  Makes us feel happy and gitty as we put on shorts and sunglasses and kick Winter in the butt.  But are we really paying attention to what it all means for us?  Or....could mean for us?

We ask a lot of God.  I know I do anyway.  And then my mind goes all turbo speed while God just might be talking back.  Things-to-do....things I want-to-do....things I need-to-do....things I think-I-need-to-do.....blah blah blah....

Meanwhile, God, you sit here patiently.  Waiting, listening, sighing deeply, waiting for me to turn and look at you.  To stop and breathe you in.  For real.
I'm not asking anything of you. (I'm not saying it's not tempting to just ask because that's what I do most of the time anyway).  It's easier to ask - keeps me in charge of what I want and what I think I need.

So I'm not asking anything of you today, God.  I'm just trying to put my heart in your hands.

I'm just trying.... to shut up.....and put my heart in your hands.


 

Writing to God: Tuesday of Holy Week

Jeremiah 31: 2-13
Enlightenment

Jeremiah is a poem of the joyful future return from exile for the people of Israel.  It is a celebration of the hoped-for journey home - a journey that remembers its brokenness but literally dances in God's delivering presence and love through it all.  The people, it says, "found grace in the wilderness."

In the Gospel of Mark, Tuesday of the last week of Jesus' life begins at chapter 11 verse 20.  It continues until 14:1.  Tuesday is full of action, sayings, and teachings of Jesus - including the Greatest Commandment, predictions of the temple destruction, the lesson from the withered fig tree of Monday, and the widow's offering.
______________

What kinds of lessons do you have to teach us, God?
About love, and mercy, and kindness?
Are they lessons that lend us joy in our grief and a lightness in our daily step?

What kinds of lessons, God, do you have to teach us?
About humility, and patience, and trust?
Will they be lessons to help us in the waiting seasons, the times of change, our losses and failures?

God, what kinds of lessons do you have to teach us?
What about lessons of faith, of hardship, of perserverance?

For you knew what season it was, yesterday, when you went looking for fruit on that fig tree.
And, in the same kind of way, you know the skips and gallops, trips and falls that we take through this life.  You know each and every one.  (That could cause a person to be still before you.)

So we cannot help but ask:  on this long and eventful Tuesday - what lessons do you have to teach us?

But wait.  First we need to understand what it means to be watchful and how to listen - for only then will we be able to hear you.

Amen.