LENT 2025 THE HARDEST PART: HURT WE CARRY, HOPE WE FIND
Joy and sorrow. Love and loss. Big wins and even bigger failures. We cling tightly to the beautiful moments, but then the phone rings, a diagnosis drops, or some creeping ache reminds us that everything—everything—is so much more fragile than we’d like to admit. Life can be too much. And Lent is the season where we sit in that heaviness. For 40 days, we stop pretending things will suddenly get better and face the truth: life is fragile, and so are we.
Lent begins with Ash Wednesday, when we hear the words no one really wants to say out loud: you are dust, and to dust you shall return. It’s not exactly the kind of thing you’d embroider on a pillow, but it’s a truth we need. Lent invites us to stop pretending we can hold it all together and instead sit with the weight of what we carry—the grief, the regrets, the messes we can’t untangle, no matter how much we try.
Here’s the hardest part: to be human is to carry the weight of our own mortality. We love the joy and triumph of Easter morning, but first, we have to sit with Good Friday, when God is on the losing team. Jesus, who we look to for hope and healing, suffers and dies. His pain is real, just like ours. We can’t rush past it. We can’t skip to the good part, because it’s through the deepest hurt that we begin to understand what it means to be fully human, fully broken.
In, The Hardest Part: Hurt We Carry, Hope We Find, we’ll walk through these paradoxes together. Let’s sit with the ache and the fragile parts we’d rather avoid, and trust that hope is somewhere nearby, waiting for us to notice. Because when we stay with the hard part, something else happens: the good part begins to unfold, slowly but surely. – Kate Bowler
During this Lenten season there will be Individual study guides available in The Commons. If you lead a group and want to participate in this year’s Lenten theme then there will Small be Group study guides available in the office. Looking forward to our Lenten season ahead.
Schedule:
March 5th - Ash Wednesday: Being Human!
March 9th - Lent One: Terrible and Beautiful!
March 16th - Lent Two: Lament!
March 23rd - Lent Three: Imagination!
March 30th - Lent Four: Wisdom!
April 6th - Lent Five: Love!
April 13th - Palm Sunday: Living!
April 20th - Easter Sunday: Believing! Worship at 5 and 7pm
Soup Supper from 4:45 to 6:45pm