You are facing an enormous challenge right now. The challenge feels much bigger than you are. It will take everything you’ve got to prevail. You have explored all the options. No easy solution exists. You wrestle with this challenge every day. Your mind won’t let you stop thinking about it. The challenge gnaws at you when you get up in the morning and swirls in your thoughts when you try to fall asleep at night.
Does this scenario ring true for you? It does for me. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t wrestling with something big and feeling wrapped up in the struggle. The challenges have kept evolving and changing, but the general scenario has remained consistent.
For all of us, this is the nature of being human. The struggles change but never stop, and there’s no magic bullet that will provide an easy way out.
There is, however, a way to cope — even to thrive. The season of Lent gives us some powerful resources for making this happen. This season proclaims that Christ’s ending offers us a new beginning — in even the most challenging areas of our lives.
How do we find this new beginning? A major shift needs to happen within us, and that’s where this year’s theme has dramatic implications for our lives.
The life of Jesus was a hero’s journey. When we shift out of our woe-is-me mentality and cultivate more and more of the heroic mindset that inspired him, we stop feeling stuck, victimized, and weak. Instead, we begin to draw on our untapped spiritual resources and start fighting our battles with surprising reserves of stamina, focus, determination, and resilience.
Are you ready to make this shift? Are you willing to do your part to make it happen?
I can’t wait for Sunday and the opportunity we will have to encourage one another in this life-enriching process.
Love and blessings,
Evan Howard,
Minister