Soul Sister Time

            As the Lenten Season draws to a close approaching Holy Week, can you look back and honestly admit that you are the chief sinner?   I hope so.   There is no spiritual lesson as helpful as seeing your own sin as so hideous that it sent Jesus Christ to the cross.   When you bundle up all the sins that others have sinned against you in this year—none compares to your lifetime of personal sin against a Holy God.             I attended the Forgiveness Sunday service at the Orthodox Church that precedes their Lenten journey.   There is a special liturgy that is used for this service focusing on the reality that each of us are grave sinners.   The closing of this time of prayer is when the clergy come out in their black robes (the beautiful purple is laid aside.)   Then beginning with the head priests, and assistant priests each person in...

H. Richard Niebuhr said that Americans believe: A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross [i] .   That is a convicting statement.   It’s easy to think of the cross as a beautiful piece of art or jewelry, rather than what it fully represents. When I meditate on my sins, I have no place to leave them but the cross.   As much as I don’t like to think over my sins, I don’t like to think about the cross even more.   It is a truly horrific and inhumane site.   The movie The Passion of the Christ, physicians’ documentation of the cross’s effect on the body, and reading the Bible’s description of Jesus’ sufferings alert my senses to the reality of the suffering Christ endured on my behalf.   But no matter how serious I am about identifying my sins, or meditating on Christ’s sufferings, I could never fully understand what it was like. The cross of criminals was the m...

            What does it mean to forgive as God?   What does it mean to forgive as man?   To forgive as God, God said it was necessary for God to become man.   Forgiveness insisted that God shed His own blood. To forgive as God is a perfect and eternal action that results in perceptible and mysterious outcomes.     Walter Wangerin ( As for Me and My House ) calls forgiveness a divine absurdity .   Forgiveness is the intention of the Lenten journey.   How can we conceive of what it means to forgive as God? Evidentially, it is to forgive as man.   God says it was necessary for man to forgive in the same manner as God.   In Matthew 6:12 Jesus says , And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.   He goes on to explain:   For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others th...

Lent, the color of purple and church prayers invite us to ponder our sins in a way we normally avoid.   At least that is what happens for me.   I try to remember to repent.   I really do; it’s just so easy to overlook my own sins.   I have too many other things to think about.   Even in prayer, I forget my sins and get on with what is on my heart,--what I want God to do for me.   During a Lenten silent retreat I forced myself to focus on sins.   It was a slow and surprising effort.   I always begin silent retreats with a period of confession.   It just seems the place to start.   But then I move on.   I want to have adventures with God.   During my silence, I want to be loved, make a connection, and find out what God wants me to do with my life during my silence.   Rather than quickly cover confession I fully surrendered and even challenged myself to name as many sins as possible.   I needed God’s help in this ...

                The Lectionary includes the passage about the temptation of Jesus as the reading for the first Sunday of Lent every year.   This passage is important as we consider how our Savior was led by the Spirit to the wilderness for the purpose of fasting for forty days and being tempted by the devil.                 How have your first two and a half weeks of Lent gone?   Have there been many temptations so far?   Are you finding your journey exciting and surprisingly pleasurable?   After I visited the actual wilderness where He went in February of 2012, I will never think of the Wilderness journey Jesus took the same.   I fully entered the wilderness using all my senses to see, hear, feel and taste its offerings.   I found it to be the opposite of what I expected.   A few days before, I ha...

            The transition from Winter to Spring is a lovely metaphor for Lent.   It is convenient that in the Northern Hemisphere, Lent begins at the end of winter and ends with the first buds of spring.   On a recent nature walk I came upon a four-year-old boy and his father.   They had stopped on the path waiting for mom and baby to catch up when I happened to pass by.   I overheard the conversation between father and son.   The little boy was enraptured by the tree that was right in front of him.   With a distinct giggle, the little boy exclaimed, The tree is naked!   The father seemed confused as to how to respond to his son’s preoccupation with what he described as a naked tree.   He rattled on about how the leaves had fallen off because of winter, but the child insisted that the tree was naked, implying that it was somehow defected.   He didn’t accept his father’s reasonable expl...

This week we celebrate Ash Wednesday—the beginning of Lent on Wednesday and St. Valentine’s Day on Thursday. I had already written the devotion before I was looking at the calendar.   This devotion about ethics has led me to consider the Lenten Season of penitence to prepare for Easter as the perfect time to focus this year’s Lenten series on our desire to eliminate sins from our earthly experience.   Not an easy task to achieve, but well worth living your life trying to attain!   So for Lent I will offer you a series that encourages you to think about the wonder of ceasing from sin and wish you a Happy Valentine’s Day hoping you feel God’s grand love for you!   The Ethics Behind Ethical Behavior             Every year my professional counseling license requires that I take a 3 hour ethics course to keep my status.   It is the only subject that is required.   Over the decades I have been to ev...