MESSAGE FROM PASTOR EMILY

Dear friends,

A few weeks in and it seems like Lent has been here forever and is planning to stay forever. Winter – in the early part of March – often seems the same.

Is it any wonder, then, that the name “Lent” itself essentially means “Long”? The English word Lent derives from the same root as “lengthen” – a seasonal observation about the lengthening days that promise Spring. The Latin term for Lent (quadragesima) is also a reference to time – meaning, essentially, forty days. Lent is a time that’s supposed to be long. In Biblical stories – 40 days in the ark, 40 years wandering the desert between slavery in Egypt and the Land of Promise, 40 days of prayer and fasting and temptations in the wilderness – forty simply means “longer than we can count” – a seemingly endless stretch of time.

What are the “too-long” things in your life? In my family, it’s the agonizing pace of the process by which my well-loved foster nephews move toward legal adoption. It might be waiting for a birth or death, it might be a well-entrenched habit, it might be the time it takes for a job or a relationship to evolve.

The witness of scripture, of course, is not just that God’s promises wait at the end of the forty days or years – but that God is present and active in the slowly passing time. That in those “forty” times, when waiting and familiarity breed distraction, God is here, and concentrating on us and on what we will become, with God’s love.

So, in this Lenten month, I invite you to take a fresh look at the endless times and places in our lives – looking for what God is doing in the longest times, the times when we’ve lost count.

Blessings,

Pastor Emily