MONDAY, MARCH 3
“You become what you do.” A guy said this to me when I was a college freshman. He was pretty obnoxious, actually, quite full of himself, but that line has stuck with me my whole life. You become what you do. But not just each of us in isolation. We are affected by others. We become what we all together do. Every day in every way we make choices that have consequences for ourselves and other people. This is a blessing and a curse. It is a source of despair and a source of hope. We cannot undo the past. Every time we say yes to some things we say no to countless other things. We make dozens of choices every day that matter for ourselves, for other people, for the world. Sometimes we do good, sometimes we hurt people. Sometimes what helps one person hurts another. We live embedded in opportunities and constraints created by other people’s choices, and we in our turn create constraints and opportunities for ourselves and others. This is a law of nature, this is how our finite and interdependent universe works. It can be terrifying to contemplate just how much what we do matters for ourselves and for others, how much good and evil we do to others, often without even knowing it.

And so I bring this all to God. My weakness, my terror at mattering in the world. The times I have hurt other people, the ways I fall short in doing justice. But also the times I have helped other people, the ways in which I have worked for justice, and the ways other people have helped me. And in God it comes around. I am part of God. I am not God, but I am part of God, a fragment of God, and I live surrounded by and interconnected with all the other fragments of God, all the other people who, like me, are a strange mixture of good and evil. I do not need to be God, I do not need to be all-good, all-powerful. I just need to slow down, to let myself feel the presence of God all around me, to let myself know my connection to God and to all of life, to feel my connection to the joy and the sorrow of all of humanity. In this act of reaching out, of prayer, and of submission I feel a sense of direction as well as acceptance of my limitations. My awareness of my own failings has helped me to grow and deepen as a human being. I have become less self-centered, less self-righteous, more open to and forgiving of the struggles and disappointments of other imperfect people, and more able to do what is right. When I allow God to find me, I experience joy that I have been called to a life of connection and meaning and purpose. I become what I do.

Pamela Oliver

TUESDAY, MARCH 4
Every year
everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
Mary Oliver(In Blackwater Woods)

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 5
For me, the season of Lent is flavored by the year I went through confirmation. It was a bad year: by my mother’s account, there are large chunks of it missing from my memory entirely, and most of what I do remember is being frightened. I was, at the same time, arrogant and convinced I was special, and also faced for the first time with not mattering and not liking myself much. After all, I hadn’t done much yet. There wasn’t anything to like. I talked a lot about shadows, hiding, death, and pain. I doodled swords across all my homework, and was pretty well convinced that I wouldn’t care if I died. I could not compare myself to Jesus at Gethsemane, or even to the disciples falling asleep in the garden. I identified with Judas, loved because Jesus loved everyone, and finding, in the end, failure and defeat. There was nothing interesting or beautiful about how I felt, this depression, because it served no purpose. Climbing out of it has been a matter of learning to care about and do things for other people far more than it’s had anything to do with my opinion of myself.

Fast forward ten years, having my heart broken three times, a degree in philosophy and a lot of friends. Still not Jesus, still not able to die for the sins of the world. Still not really living up to what I want to be. But, somewhere when I wasn’t paying attention, I’m not the youngest person I know anymore. They say nothing is ever wasted, and sometime in the last year or so, other people have started being like me in ways they weren’t before, and every now and then, when I’m very lucky, I can see just where a hug or a smile or even a turning away with a frown can do the most good. No profound insight or anything, just an old blindness that’s dropped away. It’s growing up.

You don’t get Easter if you don’t go through Lent. They’re not two separate things, rebirth and death. It’s not even that the dying is the cost you pay to live again. The dying is the same thing as the living again. Which means, incidentally, that living again is the same thing as dying. There’s no trick to it. We’re human. It’s just a thing we do: we remember.

Elizabeth Lemke-Oliver

THURSDAY, MARCH 6
Grace happens. Without invitation, without warning, sometimes it just sneaks up on you, stops you in your tracks, and says, “Pause; feel; find your center, for that’s where you’ll find God patiently waiting for you.”

This past summer, if you’d asked me if I needed to teach Sunday School, I would have laughed the ironic laugh of one who is slightly stressed, slightly crazy, and more than slightly busy. I’d have put it right up there with an IRS audit as something I “needed”. But grace happened. It began by teasing me with an article in the Communion describing a new approach to Sunday School. Several times over the next few days, I found myself picking through the chaos that is our kitchen table to find that Communion and pull it back out to reread Tammy’s article. It wasn’t like I’d decided I was going to teach Sunday School again – after all, I was moderator elect and the coach of a couple of middle school math teams and subject to pages from customers – but every time I read Tammy’s article I felt my head nod and my heart lift. So I wasn’t at all surprised when the next time I bumped into Tammy I said what I felt but hadn’t really acknowledged to myself – I wanted to teach Sunday School. There was grace, putting words in my mouth. True words, words it had already found in my heart. And as grace led me to say those words, it spoke other words to me: “Pause; feel; find your center, for that’s how you’ll renew yourself.”

Every Sunday, I begin my worship by finding my center with the help of Leah and the kids we guide. We leave our shoes at the door, we dim the lights, we light candles, we ring bells – we create ritual. Through our ritual, we learn to stop the outside world a tiny bit, to open our inner ears to God in each of us. Through our ritual, we reopen spaces that we’ve let close up, spaces that God moves into, spaces in which God silently speaks to us. Through our ritual, I’ve learned that teaching Sunday School is exactly what I need.

So grace happened to me. Without invitation, without warning, it snuck up on me, it stopped me in my tracks, and it said to me: “Pause; feel; find your center, for God is there with you.”

John Lemke

FRIDAY, MARCH 7
God, give us grace to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
Courage to change the things
which should be changed,
and the Wisdom to distinguish
the one from the other.

Living one day at a time,
Enjoying one moment at a time,
Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace,
Taking, as Jesus did,
This sinful world as it is,
Not as I would have it,
Trusting that You will make all things right,
If I surrender to Your will,
So that I may be reasonably happy in this life,
And supremely happy with You forever in the next.
Amen.

Reinhold Niebuhr

SATURDAY, MARCH 8
Renewal is a funny thing. It’s elusive and usually best when unexpected. I have had many of those moments this year with the 22 new loves of my life- my second graders. As a first year teacher I am having a ball and wouldn’t change a thing, but that is not to say that there aren’t days when I get red in the face and just can’t believe that a seven year old got the best of me.

Somehow on these days it seems so important that we get that fact practice done now so we can move on to science. Time’s a tickin’ and they are dawdling. Those days, days when teaching is less like teaching and more like cattle herding I find I need renewal the most. It’s like being in a pit, one that I can’t get out of alone. Once that rushed frustrated teacher makes an appearance it is hard to find the teacher that is patient and warm. I just can’t do it on my own some days. And on those days, without fail, just when I’ve gotten to the point where I am ready to say, ‘Forget it! I am done,’ one of those sweet silly souls comes up to me and says something either so profound or hysterical that I do the unthinkable: I laugh. My kids know this laugh well and when they hear it they all want to know what happened, what was said that got them their teacher back. And once again we become a class.

It’s in the laugh that the renewal happens. I am pulled out of the pit by a seven year old. I am reminded that it’s not in fact so bad, that I’m doing ok, and most importantly that there is a being out there with quite a sense of humor. It allows me to restart: clear the slate and try again.

Kari Nonn

SUNDAY, MARCH 9
I have learned that when things are looking the darkest, when fear is strong, when I am unsure of where to turn, that if I can just remember to be still a moment and pray, I will know God is near. If I pray without ceasing, which to me means any moment during a busy day, I remember that when fear knocks at the door and courage answers, there is no one there and I can get through those challenging times.

In the midst of human busyness which controls so many waking minutes, just being mindful that I have a choice to step back and let go of what is troubling me, I can find peace and the courage to go forward. The truth is that we do not face anything alone for God is always with us. When I forget this simple I struggle and feel anxious, but when I remember this important truth, I find comfort and peace. Setbacks are temporary and can be healed by a healing quiet spirit that brings renewal. May we remember this truth especially when we need it most.

Joyce Binder