Are We There Yet?

I've shared before that Lent is not my favorite season of the church year, but it's working this year. The liturgy of the season is helping focus my mind on the things I need to sort through, edit out, strip down so that I can make room for the good stuff.

We're about halfway into Lent and I'm enjoying the weekly community Lenten services and LUNCH. Like having lunch at Grandma's once a week - church ladies' lunch. Enough said about that. Angel food cake, come on, where else do you get that except a church basement or at Grandma's?

Right now, Lent feels like my neighborhood looks. There's mostly just the bigger piles of snow left and it's warmer, but the sun hasn't really shone in days. It's really very gray out there. The things that have been buried under the snow since December have been unearthed. It's thawed out enough that I can get my Christmas lights out of the shrubs now. The neighbor's blow up Christmas tree. A downspout in the middle of someone's yard. All the things that were covered by two feet of snow for months are now exposed. It's a mess, really.

I'm kind of at that place in my Lenten journey. I've uncovered a lot, and there's still more to go. There's hopeful signs that Easter will come, like the spots of green in the grass and seeing tiny yellow-green daffodils pushing through the mud at Sally's house. But it is muddy, damp, and not very pretty right now.

I'm ready to move on to the next leg of the Lenten journey and this Sunday, that means planting seeds with the children at church. Planting seeds is a way of planting hope. There's no guarantee they will sprout but we certainly hope they will. It's time to start thinking towards the hope of new life on the journey. What are the seeds God is planting in you?