Entries categorized as Lent
The Prodigal Father
One of Luke’s most famous stories is the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11 ff). To be prodigal means to be generous to the point of being a reckless spendthrift, to give without concern for whether what is given will be wasted – a term that obviously fits the Prodigal Son well. All his actions from the More...
try different
I wrote last week, “Just (don’t) try harder”. Seth Godin says something similar, and adds, “try different“:
The usual mantra is to ‘try harder’. Trying harder is impossible when you’re already trying as hard as you can.
But you can always try different…
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Turn aside, and see
Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet More...
Saved for (not from)
I’ve noticed lately that a lot of the language around the idea of salvation revolves around the idea of being saved from something… saved from sin, saved from punishment, saved from isolation or alienation, from sin, from death, from hell.
But really the whole tenor of Christianity and the New Testament is that we are saved More...
Lost and found
Luke 15 : 1-10 tells us two stories about losing something, and then finding it again. A coin, and a sheep. Two things of moderate economic significance, two things that involved considerable effort to find once they were lost. But although they are often told this way, I would say that they are not the More...
just (don’t) try harder
It’s a common misconception that Lent is about self-improvement. Somehow a half-remembered custom of giving things up has been mixed in with our society’s obsession with self-help and self-improvement, so that we’ve blurred the true meaning of the fast into a rather individualistic concept, more like a New Year Resolution to detox or de-clutter.
Lent is More...
Lent Beach Tweets
this is novel.
More...
Ash Wednesday
It’s one of the curiosities of recent times that choosing whether to fast, and what to give up, falls to the individual. “Are you giving up anything for Lent?” was a question no-one would ever have asked a few hundred years ago, when everyone gave up the same things, and it was only remarkable and noticeable More...
Shrove Tuesday, Lent and ashes
Did you eat pancakes last night? As usual I ran into a few people who don’t know the significance of Shrove tuesday and Ash Wednesday. When I was a child this stuff was taught at Sunday School, Church and school. But no-one goes to Sunday School any more, teaching traditions has fallen out of fashion More...
Giving it Up
It’s not long now till Lent. Have you got your Lent book yet? There is plenty of good stuff out there…
My Lent book for 2010 is called Giving it Up. It’s a book of 47 short chapters, so you can read one every day through Lent. This is the theme: most people associate Lent with More...
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author musician theologian
Maggi has kept a blog since September 2003, writing about theology and faith, the arts and literature, and a little about life and random nonsense...
This title focuses on the importance of understanding who God is - and who he is not. It explores the core Lenten idea of 'giving up', taking it beyond the traditional idea of simply abstaining from something.
This book compares and contrasts the different Gospel narratives of Christ's coming. It is designed specifically for use in 2007, highlighting links to the Church calendar. It is intended for those wanting daily Bible readings for Advent.
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