Lent 2017

Lent begins tomorrow (March 1). Prayerfully consider what  you want to remove from you life for this season. I promise it’s worth it.

I always want more. More food. More stuff. More money. More power. More friends. More hobbies. More time for myself. More. Lent is a time we rebel against more. The idea of willfully removing things from your life couldn’t feel more foreign to the modern human and couldn’t be more needed. Fasting, in the Christian tradition, is a period of time that you abstain from certain things–usually food–in order to clear space in your own soul for God to work. Fasting is about cultivating hunger. Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness will be filled, Jesus said.

As we enter into the next 40 days of Lent (a time of fasting on the church calendar each year leading into Easter), I would encourage you to pick one or two things to remove. Your body or mind will fight against the idea. Fight back. There are no medals to be earned at the end of the 40 days. No one is forcing you into this. This is for you. It’s good for you. As you empty yourself, you’ll find yourself being filled with what God offers.

The focus of Lent for me this year is awareness. I feel like I’ve been experiencing life in a fog of constant information and stimuli. I want to experience a tangible awareness of God’s presence that I’ve been missing. So I’m reorienting my days away from consumption. Drastically less social media, a strict diet, and intermittent fasting. More silence, more creation of stuff that matters, and more awareness.

I’m praying that in the rhythm of fasting and feasting (Sunday’s are a time where you break the fast and feast), you’ll find God at work in and through you.

-Pastor Joseph

“If we think of fasting as breaking the vicious addictive cycles of loyalty to a consumer society, then we will certainly recognize prominent forms of addiction…that may admit of disciplined disengagement.” Walter Brueggemann