Ben's February Letter

Dear Friends in Christ:

My mind is all over the place as I write this. For the third day I am snowed in—meaning both a break from ordinary work but also an increasing sense of cabin fever. It is my grandfather’s 99th birthday, but also an anxious time in the news cycle. Today I am grateful and bored and afraid and comfortable and antsy and joyful and hopeful. I’m like this on days when I’m not snowed in, too, but today I have clarity on it. Part of our complexity as human beings is that we rarely feel one emotion at once, and we can (and must!) balance all of them against each other to function.

Lent begins in three weeks. (Come to the Ash Wednesday service on February 18th!) Lent is a season for balancing emotions—as we hold our grief and guilt and attempts at restraint alongside our hope and the joy we know is coming at Easter. This tension between emotions is as old as the season itself, when new converts to the Christian faith fasted and prayed in preparation for baptism on Easter Sunday. It has always come with a mix of feelings and conflicted thoughts.

Our Lenten Series this year remembers this mix. Tell Me Something Good: Grounding ourselves in the good news this Lent from A Sanctified Art, asks us to remember that Jesus’ life and work really is good news. The challenges, the frustrations, the sadnesses, the negatives—these are real. But so is the good that comes when we are living with, for, and like Jesus. Whatever else clouds the picture—there is love here, there is abundance here, there is care here, there is possibility here, there is (still!) life here.

This is, perhaps, the good news: not that we will live with uncomplicated minds and mixed emotions, but that there is, with Jesus, always good news if we look for it.

This Lenten season, we will explore that in worship and in our Grove series on good news. In thesecold days when our minds run amok—good news is still coming. I look forward to finding it, with you.

Hopefully,

Rev. Ben