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Last Sunday, Pastor Charlotte invited us into a different kind of Lent. It’s gentler than the one I’m used to.
Instead of turning these 40 days into a marathon of stamina by refraining from what we give up or rigidly keeping what we add, we’ve been invited to exercise our “trust muscle.”
I don’t know many people who are actually good at trusting deeply. “They said they would, so they will” works. At least casually. Keeping appointments and making deadlines is relatively low-stakes stuff.
But for complicated, deep, messy human stuff, trust is much more difficult:
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“You said I could count on you, and now I know I can’t.”
- “You said you’d always be there for me, and you left.”
It’s not hard to see why we learn to stop trusting, and why some of us eventually stop asking for help. Unfortunately, in our time, we call that maturity.
Psalm 121 reminds us that there is another way to live.
We talk a lot about covenant. For convenience, we squash it down into “I’ll do my part if you do yours.”
(No matter how rich, what poverty we live in when we reduce our relations to transactions!)
Covenant is life-sustaining. Like breath. Like blood moving through a body whether we notice it or not. The Holy One does not promise to eliminate every hardship on the road. Instead, over and over, like the pulse of blood through the body, this psalm offers consolation in the midst of the journey: keeping watch, steadying our feet, offering shade beneath the beating sun, courage in the dark.
God’s covenant of love moves through this psalm in almost every line: Keeper. Steady Arm. Guardian. Watcher. Helper.
This Lent, perhaps the real practice is not in striving to prove anything, but instead in lifting our eyes, and letting help come.
Wishing you peace,
Gregory Peebles, Director of Ministry
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