Practice the disciplines deliberately.

Beloved of God,

    As we continue to move through Lent and toward Easter, I hope you are having moments where you are able to pray more deeply and deliberately, to study Scripture more carefully, and to understand your discipleship more fully if you are engaging in a spiritual discipline or practice for the season. 
    And all of that is good. It is good to pray, study Scripture, and practice the disciplines more deliberately. It is so often the most important thing we can do. But the full force of that importance should also be held together with the long view of what God is doing among us, and where this journey ends. Jeremiah 31:31-34 gives us a picture of what it looks like when we become most fully aware of who God is. We become people whose minds and hearts and words and deeds are shaped by love of and obedience to our God. 
    Right now many of us are paying attention to the ways that this isn’t the case, and working toward a truer discipleship that really does move and act in concert with God’s Holy Spirit in us. We may even find ourselves frustrated at how undisciplined in thought, word or deed that we really are. And we ought to take a hard look at that, because knowing that about ourselves is important. But it is also the case that this passage ends with a word of forgiveness. The ways that we may fail don’t cancel out the moments when we are faithful, and there is always forgiveness enough to repent, take up the good work of following Christ, and continue on. The world needs people who know and love God fully. The world needs those people even if they aren’t perfect. The world needs us to keep at it even when we realize we’re flawed disciples. 
    Press on. You will come to know and love God more fully, even if you lose the story line from time to time. Though you might stumble you will not fall headlong, for the Lord holds you by the hand.

Please join me this week in praying for:

• An end to this pandemic
  
• Wisdom as this congregation takes up a wide range of considerations from our foundational documents, to personnel policies, to the possibility of new ministries and/or new ministers.
  
• Those among us who are suffering from sickness; that there will be great healing and abundant peace.
  
• Our students, teachers, administrators and others doing the good work of education in these crazy days.
  
• In praise for little moments of joy that we so often find day by day, week by week.
  
• For those facing moments of political unrest, or danger on top of the pandemic, especially our Christian brothers and sisters in Myanmar.
  
• Those who will be marking the anniversary in the coming days of a loved one lost to COVID, even as a threat remains.
  
• One another (please email [email protected] if you’d like to be added to our prayer list).
  

You are the salt of the earth; you are the light of the world.,
Marshall