20 February 2007

Oops (or "How an entire liturgical season managed to sneak up and surprise this pastor")

So, um, Lent starts tomorrow.

Oh, not surprised by that?

Well. How nice for you.

I, on the other hand, have almost completely and totally been taken by surprise. Lent begins tomorrow!! Ack!

To be fair, I should mention, I am on maternity leave right now. Today begins week 3 of the whopping 4 weeks I decided to take. (I'm REALLY wishing I'd planned to take 6 weeks and that I would have decided I to just deal with the attendant fussiness of the congregants instead of being ultra-accomodating. )
Before I had Daniel, I got all my bulletins together for my absence and arranged to hold cooperative services with the DOC church across the river on Wednesday evenings. Each week, the services will switch between our two congregations as to which church hosts. And my colleague at the other church is officiating the first three services and I'm officiating the last three. So tomorrow, there will be a Disciples service offered for my congregants, though it won't be at our church, and I think I'm going to pack up the kids and go. Dennis will be at class, but his mom is planning on being there and we can give it a practice run or two before she has to handle both of them at the services that I'm officiating.
I'm actually looking forward to it. I personally love Lent -- I think it's my favorite church season. It's focused and meaningful and full of imagery and possibilities for creativity.
I never manage to do very well observing it personally though, because I tend to be too focused on church stuff. This year, with this little mini-respite at the beginning, I feel like perhaps I could do a better job applying Lent to my own spiritual growth. So I'm going to be thinking about how to do that in the next two hours left in this day. And probably a little more tomorrow.
I just wish it would have occurred to me last week that Lenten possibilities were on the very near horizon. But better late than never, right? Right?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Same thing happened to me. I had knee surgery. Went on drugs. Woke up and it was Ash Wednesday!

Hope it goes well tonight -

Anonymous said...

April, here's a website that might enable you to take a few minutes each day during Lent, for your spiritual growth. It might even coincide with Daniel's feeds! Now just how easy could this be!

amalee

http://www.sacredspace.ie/