February 2022
Dear Friends in Christ,
Happy February!
February is a bridge month, split between the brilliant light of Epiphany and the ensuing descent into Lent. Lent is a season made to offer our broken lives and our broken world to God, knowing that while there is much we can do, mending is God’s specialty.
This year our Lenten theme is “A Time for Mending.” Just when everything has lined up in life exactly as you wanted it, an experience of unanticipated disaster spoils everything. Health declines, someone dies, a spouse leave, bills pile up, friends reject us, our child makes a bad decision. It’s easy to lose hope that life will ever get better again.
As a nation, somewhere along the way, we have lost the art of mending. Once, whole professions were dedicated to the task of restoring broken objects to make them useful and valuable once again. Mending is a slow process, one that requires much patience. A person who mends must be able to understand where something is broken and see what is loose or missing. It takes precious time to study the problem and come up with possible solutions.
This is as equally true with the human body. Mending of the human body, mind, and spiritis difficult as a process under normal circumstances and it has proven even more challenging during the COVID-19 pandemic. The medical impact of this virus has been well documented, but what has also been seen is the enormous toll it takes on psychological health. The rates of anxiety, depression, suicide, and overdose have dramatically increased both in Wisconsin and nationwide.
We are in great need of mending! You are invited to join this Lenten season as we seek God’s mending power to heal our bodies, our minds, and our spirit. We are providing a daily devotion book with reflection and prayer. On Thursdays & Sundays, worship will surround the study and message of the gospel of John, the Mending Net Minister. On Wednesdays we will have soup suppers and feature special guest speaker’s that can help us with the physical, mental, and spiritual parts of mending.
The question is: can we distance ourselves from distractions long enough to see the empty spaces and missing pieces? Are we willing to give up some of our precious time to mend what is broken? Perhaps this Lent you will come up with a list of things left undone for far too long. Making the list is easy. The difficult part is setting aside time required to do the hard work of mending the places of trauma. We know that, in the end, whatever time we give to mending our brokenness will be worth it.
In Christ we mend,
Pastor Jim