- This event has passed.
We are cancelling the Ash Wednesday Meal and Service tonight because of the weather.
Because the forecast is for ice, we are being cautious. We have decided not to offer a virtual service or reinstate meditation because of the anticipated loss of power and because of the nature of the service – it’s not the same without the ashes.
Sunday we will kick off Lent with a meaningful worship service that will cover all that Ash Wednesday offered as well.
Please be safe and warm tonight. Below is a devotional poem for the evening if you wish to use it.
Blessings,
Rev. Laura
Reclaiming Wilderness
It’s time to reclaim the wilderness
I think
to revisit it and recognize
the life that is there.
Too often I have heard people
I have heard myself
say that the desert is a lifeless place,
that it is full of despair and hopelessness,
a place of desolation and the ending of things.
But when I sit there
when I pause from my everyday life
and just sit there
I find it teeming with life,
filled to overflowing with little mysteries
I might otherwise overlook.
I think the biblical people had it right
when they used one word
for wilderness and desert: both places that
in our modern, busy, proper world,
we have forgotten, ignored,
tried to escape from,
tried to insulate ourselves from.
But it’s time we revisited them for,
like the dark of night,
there is so much life to be found there,
and hope,
and newness.
It is in the night
in the desert
in the wilderness –
when I let go of me –
that I can truly grab hold
of the one who made me.
Donald Schmidt © 2016
