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| Tomato seedling in a Jiffy 7 Peat Pellet (TM) |
As we enter Lent this year, Lancaster is in the grips of winter. It snowed again today, and the temperature has been chilly even by my standards over the last few weeks. But the tomato plants are up in the propagator, and I expect the peppers and cabbages to follow within the next couple of days. While I won't order any chicks until May, the cages for the quail are in place and the barn is just about ready for spring. I suppose all of this is to say that Winter, like Lent, is a mixed bag of experiences. It certainly has (at least when properly observed) those chilling days when we recognize our own sin and are compelled to make difficult changes in our lives. But it is also filled from beginning to end with the hope of new life and the anticipation of Easter joy.
My prayer for all of us this Lent is that the Holy Ghost would convict us all and give us at least one or two sleepless nights and rather miserable days- days when we will not have to fast, because our sorrow over the things we need to change in our lives will render us unable to eat with any sense of satisfaction or enjoyment. Most of us, indeed all of us from time to time continue doing what we have always done and never really thought about. That doing hurts people around us and forms a callous on our souls that prevents us from seeing who God would have us to be. I sincerely pray that our Lord would help us to see through our own inattention and self satisfaction in these next few days and so enable us to purge from our lives something that really needs to go.
But I also pray for each of us that He would give us an experience of his love which will ravish us and steal our breath away as we rest in the arms of God and know the forgiveness of sin and the joys of having been accepted as a dear child of God. Jesus offers this experience to all of us. He will enable us to see the small sprouts of life and joy and peace and hope which are already all around us, and just waiting to be noticed. As the Lord accomplishes our healing, the scales fall from our eyes and we see these promises of the full joys that shall be when Jesus comes to receive us as his own. Like my new tomato plants which I can already see producing bushels of tomatoes, God has placed these little promises all around us. But often we get so busy, perhaps even with good things, that we fail to see them, and thereby miss the daily joys of knowing the promises of God.
In these days leading up to Easter, might we all be open to God's correction, and to His blessing- and as we enter Eastertide, might we all find ourselves transformed through the keeping of an holy Lent. In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, forever one God. Amen.
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