We encourage you to sign up for the 40-40-40 Lenten Challenge, a challenge with our partner Southeastern Iowa Synod to participate in Lenten practices, including these daily devotions. Just signing up counts as participation! More info here.

In these post-COVID years, I find myself wondering if church is experiencing just such a wilderness. Everything has changed, and our communities are doing their best to pick up the pieces and carry on, only the pieces we have don’t seem to fit our world anymore. Looking at our ancestors in the faith, I see ourselves in many ways like the Israelites, wandering for 40 years. So many times in their wilderness they longed to go back – to slavery, to the known discomfort which was better than the unknown future.

Yet we, God’s people, know that God holds our future, no matter how unknown. Perhaps this wilderness time is a time for fasting, just as Jesus did. A time to put down the old pieces, to pray, to sit, and to wait – to see what unfolds and what it is God is inviting us into.

I don’t know about you, but the thought of stopping, sitting, praying – it makes me a little anxious. Because if I’m not doing something (even if something definitely isn’t working), then surely everything will fall apart and fail. Yet we find that Jesus, fasting and waiting in the wilderness was the very thing that set him out on his new ministry. Previously he had been a carpenter, we believe, and this was the moment where God totally changed his mission and trajectory in the world.

Maybe, just maybe, if we stop, wait, and pray, we might begin to catch a glimpse of the new trajectory God has for the church. We might even find room in the waiting for the Spirit’s imagining – more than we could ask for.

Prayer

God, you call me from the ashes of death to live in the life of Christ.
Open my heart to listen to the voice of your Spirit. Give me courage to hear and boldness to act in those places you are revealing need to be changed. Broaden my imagination for what it means to be a disciple in your world, that I may more fully experience your love and grace. Amen.

Journal Prompt

Lent calls us to repentance, to turn from that which does not give life. This week I invite you to write or make a list of all that is getting in the way of you experiencing the fullness of life in Christ. What are those things in the congregation that no longer give life? Over the course of the week consider what God might be saying to you as you examine those things which hinder your experience of God’s life? What might God be calling you to let go, or leave behind, in order to create space for life?

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• Week One Devotions by Rev. Erika Uthe, uthe@seiasynod.org