March 2024
I’m enjoying my second read through of “Good Enough” by Kate Bowler and Jessica Richie. I read it the first time on my spiritual renewal retreat in January and now I’m reading it during Lent.
One of the devotions particularly caught my eye. It’s devotion number 16, entitled “The Bad Thing.” She talks about sitting with a friend who’s going through treatment for a sudden cancer diagnosis and how the friend changes the subject in order to not be too much for Bowler, in order to not be “the Bad Thing.”
Bowler writes: “There is tremendous pressure in our positive-thinking society to avoid sad stories…But unfortunately for Christians, we are handed a deeply sad story. Our God came to earth and took on full humanity just long enough to be murdered. Jesus rose from the grave and death was conquered…The New Testament is brimming with courage and holiness because the early church understood that faith was not a pleasant guarantee…It is beautiful and terrible, but it is not ‘positive.’ At least not the way our culture imagines.”
This month of March we get to acknowledge this beautiful and terrible truth of our faith as we continue our sermon series on Good Enough and see how our faith is good enough to sustain us through good times and bad, easy times and difficult ones.
This month of March also brings us the opportunity to help those who are going through difficult times as we are invited to support Minnesota Foodshare. Our financial donations to Minnesota Foodshare this month help our local food shelf support the needs of students in Wyoming Elementary School. We hope that you can be generous and help meet this local need.
Easter comes early this year and plans are already in place to joyously celebrate Easter on Sunday, March 31 with an Easter Breakfast, Egg Hunt and a new way of flowering the cross. We’ll also celebrate communion on Easter (instead of Holy Humor Sunday, which is the first Sunday of April), so please invite your friends and family to join us on Easter. All are welcome and wanted.
-Pastor Holly