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Dear Friends,
We are now knee-deep
in Lent, and I’m sure you’ve rediscovered that it’s taxing.
Living in discipline and obedience for 40 days is hard work.
Soon, we’ll find ourselves completely immersed in the betrayal,
crucifixion and death of our beloved Savior. And we’ll be
begging for the glorious warmth of Easter to rescue us from our
spiritual winter.
We put ourselves
through the Lenten spring training for that very reason: So we
can truly feel the extravagant grace of Easter anew. And year
after year, we make the tough journey through Lent, preparing
our hearts with discipline, humility and solemnity.
A friend of mine used
to claim that God’s greatest gift to us is sin. His point was
that without sin we wouldn’t need to be forgiven and we wouldn’t
know how good God is. To put it a more Reformed way, our
greatest gift from God is free will, because it is through the
choice to turn to God or away from God that we see the
difference. By free will we can choose to follow the path to
the cross or go our own way.
So does that mean that
we need not worry about what we do or whether we sin? As the
Apostle Paul would say, “By no means!” And, in fact, when we
choose to limit ourselves and hand over our love of sinning, we
prepare ourselves to know the grace that abounds.
During Lent, we have
voluntarily chosen to prepare our hearts and our minds for the
Lord, who we trust is coming. We don’t have to pretend that we
don’t know how the story ends, though. Unlike the original
disciples and friends, we can be confident that Jesus has risen
and we will not live in the shadow of the cross forever.
Have peace this Lenten
season,
Catherine
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