Believe it or not, it is time to get ready for Lent which begins with Ash Wednesday on February 17th. The Lenten season is quickly approaching so we wanted to keep you up to date on the resources that we have to share!
We are delighted to offer these prayers for the season of Lent & Easter as a new resource on Godspace! As we consider Time to Heal on our blog, we wanted to provide yet another avenue to aid in the healing process for this time before and during Lent. Available in download form, this set of 10 cards spans the season from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday. Each card consists of a prayer and short reflection which provides a focus for your week, enriches your spiritual life and draws you closer to God. There is one for Ash Wednesday and one for each of the 5 weeks of Lent as well as one card for Palm Sunday, Holy Week, Good Friday and Easter Sunday.
Sampling of some cards
Lent & Easter Resources
Because our resource lists are expanding, we have a new page for Lent & Easter Resources! This page will show you everything from Ash Wednesday, Lent, Holy Week, and Easter activities, prayers, liturgies, and at home ideas which have been updated for 2021! Please comment below if you think another resource should be added to our lists! We are always looking for new material to share!
New Downloadable Lenten Bundle
Included is A Journey Into Wholeness book, the new Lent/Easter Prayer Cards, and newly updated for 2021: 40 Daily Ideas Guide for Lent. This downloadable bundle is available for $12.99 (saving you $2 from purchasing individually). Click on the image below to view the bundle details.
FREE Downloads
These free downloads are now available and updated for 2021, so check out Hungering for Life and 40 Daily Ideas Guide for Lent!
Hungering for Life provides a different word as a focal point for reflection each week of Lent and encourages the reader to take photos, draw pictures or write poetry that expresses these reflections. We plan to use this activity during Lent and hope you will join us.
- Ash Wednesday: Preparation
- Week 1: Hunger
- Week 2: Fasting/Penitence
- Week 3: Hope/Promise/Expectation
- Week 4: Thanksgiving/Joy
- Week 5: Darkness/Death
- Week 6: Resurrection/Life
Did you miss our earlier post, Why Do My Prayers for Healing Never Work? Definitely worth reading! Thank you, J. Thomas!
by J. Thomas
I definitely do NOT have the gift of healing. Whenever my wife is sick with a cold, she asks me to pray for her. Actually, when she feels like a cold is coming on, we pray preventive prayers that she would not get sick. Inevitably, she gets sick, and we pray for a speedy recovery. The result – extra two weeks of runny noses and achy muscles. Then, we pray for complete healing, and the cold gets worse, passes back and forth in our household and before you know it, she’s sick again. I pray in faith and invoke the name of Jehovah Raffa, God the Healer. I pray with persistence, with fervency, and based on Scripture and activated by love and Holy Spirit, but I do not feel confirmation in my heart that my prayers had any positive impact. This has happened time and time again for 17 years over dozens of colds, flu-like diseases, and a handful of mystery ailments. I’ve now come to the conclusion that healing is not one of my spiritual gifts. I have others, but for the gift of healing prayers, God has chosen to use another part of the body.
If you read the title of this post and hoped to find answers to praying more effectively for healing, I am sorry to disappoint you. It’s more a question I ask out of frustration. I have some acceptance that I can’t have every spiritual gifting, but I’m really disappointed. I want my prayers for healing to be effective. That’s my hope and goal, and no matter how hard I try, I do not feel a win. Maybe 2 or 3 times, I can claim in faith, but that is a hugely losing record. I can’t answer the question above, but I can share with you how I’ve moved to deeper acceptance and knowledge of the Healer. A perspective that has transformed my relationship with Him, myself, and others.
photo by Oleg Illarionov on unsplash.com
Through the prophet Joel, God says, “I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten.”
Over the last 7 months, I have been experiencing a different type of healing directly from the Healer. Healing from emotional wounds, and specifically, childhood emotional wounds. There is supernatural healing going on in my life. Let me explain. I think the first 20 years of my life was about being inflicted with a host of emotional wounds and forming maladaptive ways of dealing with the resulting pain. I’ve self-diagnosed myself with Childhood Emotional Neglect (CEN), where my parents raised me, gave me food and shelter, kept me safe and even helped pay for college. For some reason, my emotional needs were not met. When it came to meeting emotional needs like feeling loved, valued, and important, there was a cultural, generational, and language gap. I think about how I never expressed to my parents how I felt sad because I didn’t know the word for “sad” in Korean. I grew up in emotional survival mode and got my validation needs met by performing well academically and coping with my loneliness with fantasies of meeting a wife at age 14. I taught myself how to ride a bike in fourth grade. And it wasn’t even until college that I learned that I should brush my teeth in the morning AND at night before going to bed. Those are the humorous symptoms of my CEN, but my family system wounded me with false core beliefs about myself and what’s lower than very low self-esteem? Right, NO self-esteem.
Over the next 20 years of my life, the negative fruit of these emotional wounds came up, and I had to deal with them and pay the consequences. As I worked on issues in therapy and with God, I might have worked through and received healing from two, maybe three, of my core emotional wounds. Three in 20 years is not bad at all as the deep work of self-reflection, reliving childhood trauma, and forming a new mindset is a life-long process.
But here’s the thing, over the last 7 months, I’ve gone through maybe 7 major healing moments resolving a lot of the emotional baggage and receiving an outpouring of God’s perfect parenting – the way he intended before family sin patterns worked its way down for generations. To go to a medical doctor, there is no reportable physical healing. I still catch colds, my body aches, and my right leg is still longer than my left. In the unseen depths in my psyche, there are emotional bullets being extracted, atrophied muscles of self-care getting stronger, and the wounds from beating myself up are on the mend. And even more, the habit of beating myself up is abating one day at a time.
The reason I can testify that these have been miraculous healings is from understanding the way our bodies and God works. With proper medical treatment and rest, our bodies really heal on their own. Common colds work their way through our systems and the most we can hope is to manage the symptoms. Broken bones heal on their own when the bone is set properly. Even emotional wounds have a natural way of healing when we form healthy relationships as adults. The Healer works through natural means and regular people like my therapist, friends, 12-step sponsor, and pastors. The Healer works through the proper administration of medication from professionals.
So where’s the miracle? I see the miracle in two ways. First, when the healing that takes place that might normally take 40 years takes place over seven months – that is the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit. Second, that I can claim in faith that it was the Lord Almighty that did the work in me, that faith is a gift from God. I rarely claim a victory because I don’t want to jinx it. But as for me and my household, I am claiming that the past emotional wounds have been healed. Of course, there is more to come. In the meantime, I am watching God as he restores the wasted years.
Through the prophet Joel, God says, “I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten.”
Feature photo above by Brett Jordan on unsplash.com
Prayers for the Season of Lent and Easter are now available as a download for only $6.99!
by Carol Dixon
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.
Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
Ring out the grief that saps the mind
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.
Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.
Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes
But ring the fuller minstrel in.
Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.
Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.
Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.
Words: Alfred Lord Tennyson, Music: Percy Fletcher
The Healing Power of Music
This wonderful poem by Lord Tennyson is a great way to welcome in the new year, particularly after a year like last year! I first remember learning the poem as a song with our Girls’ Grammar school choir. We were taking part in the annual Schools’ choir competition in our area and this was one of our set pieces that we had to learn and be judged on. We didn’t win but I will never forget the finale when all the choirs sang it together in Newcastle City Hall on the stage that had been occupied by the Beatles the week before – enough to set teenage girls’ hearts fluttering anyway. At the end, were amazed as the lights went up on the auditorium to see the entire audience, including our proud parents, rising to their feet, clapping and cheering in a way that no-one did in England in those sedate days of the early 1960s. It was such an uplifting experience for everyone that we all travelled home in a golden glow of sheer joy at the wonderful power of music.
Many years later, I was to discover the healing power of music personally in my own life after many months of debilitating illness when I was laid aside from all my usual activities and had to give up all my church commitments, including leading & singing with our church folk group. Yet in this exile from normality, I ‘learned to sing the Lord’s song in a strange land’ when God gave me the gift of hymn writing. Listening to music stood me in good stead a couple of years ago too, in long nights while waiting months for a hip replacement. I listened to healing music on my handheld tablet and took these beautiful tunes with me into the operation which was done under local anaesthetic and listened to the uplifting songs as the sawing, hammering and grinding went on to remove my old diseased hip and replace it with a new plastic and metal one which works and is free from pain. One of my favourites was Aileen Gilchrist’s ‘I see Jesus’.
One of the reasons I love Tennyson’s poem is that for me it seems to take on a new life when set to music and the marriage of words and harmony seems to underline the message of hope and new life not only at the early part of a new year but for any new start. Hopefully this year will bring a new beginning for us as more vaccines become available to combat Covid and free us from the restrictions of the pandemic so we will be able to embrace loved ones again and rejoice together for the freshness each day brings, remembering with thankfulness the sacrifice of those who have worked so tirelessly to care for us and the light of God’s richest blessings in the dark days we leave behind.
In times of sorrow and joy, I find music a great comfort to me and one of the hymns God gave me as I recovered from my bout of illness I often pray in my morning devotions. I hope you enjoy singing it.
Every new morning God gives us freely
Hears that are thankful, strength for the task,
People who love us, joy in our service,
All we have need of if we but ask.
God will be with us in all our thinking,
in all our speaking, in all we do;
and as we praise him by all our actions,
God will be with us, seeing us through.
God in the morning, God in the noontide,
God in the evening, throughout the day;
God is within us, and all around us,
behind, before us all of the way. © Carol Dixon
photo by Carol Dixon
poem and photo by Talitha Fraser,
This came out of sitting in front of a computer too long… the lines between home and work are so indistinct when they are the same place, the same room. Take breaks, reconnect with your body, breath, Creation and the Creator…
Did you miss the other post from earlier today? Check out Wounded Healer by Sheila Hamil.
by Sheila Hamil (Welcome new Godspace Community member!),
Is every day becoming ‘Groundhog Day’ for you? By that I refer to the film of that name, where a grumpy TV presenter wakes up each morning and discovers to his dismay, that it is the very same day each day, in every aspect, but he does have the capability to work changes within it. Is this is how you’re feeling with the world at the moment? Are you disillusioned? Are you are feeling dull and drained? Are you are ill or exhausted? Are you in need of a healing of body, mind or spirit?
We all possess the capability to change how the day pans out. There’s an answer in this passage from scripture, from the book of Isaiah 40:31, where it says:
Those who wait upon the LORD will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.
Why not give this a try, it can’t hurt can it? Wait upon the Lord? What does this mean?
Try this for ten minutes each morning. Clear your mind and simply listen. Imagine you’re on the phone, and it is God on the line. Open with the words: “Speak Lord, your servant is listening.” And do just that, just be quiet. Just be!
Ten minutes; that’s all it takes (or you might want to take longer). This is waiting upon the Lord.
You may want to write down any thought that comes to your mind. You may be guided to some book, even a passage of scripture; it may be that someone in need springs to mind; or a song or whispered words. God is real, personal and he’s accessible. Is ten minutes too much to ask? It may just change your day, your life, your purpose, your plans.
This is a story once told, I believe, by the Cure D’ars:
Each and every day an elderly man would enter church to say his prayers. He would sit at the back quietly for ten minutes or so, and then go out. The priest smiled to see one of his flock so devoted to a life of prayer, for he would see the man’s lips moving as he sat quite still. One day, as the man left church, they spoke together, and the priest asked the man what kind of prayers he prayed. The man replied that he said the same simple prayer every day, which was, “Hello God, this is Jim!” Some years later that same man died, and the priest had a very strange dream about him. The man was entering heaven, where he met the most beautiful angel, who introduced him to the One who sat on the throne, saying to him, “Hello Jim, this is God!”. Ten minutes a day well spent!
Song: This was written for a friend in trouble, and I just didn’t know how to help her or how to convince her how much she was loved by God. ©1992 Sheila Hamil
Taken from the “Lockdown Legacy” series on Sheila Hamil’s YouTube channel.
by Christine Sine
Yesterday, I received an email from one of my favourite seed catalogues talking about gardening trends that inspire happiness, good health and tranquility. They talked about vegetables that boost our immune systems and flowers with happy faces that give us joy, and calming gardens full of flowers in soothing colors and the gentle sounds of swaying grasses. I heartily endorse all of these types of healing gardens, but as many of you know, my favourites are the contemplative gardens and in the last few years, I have become quite passionate about the power of such small gardens to heal, to sooth and to bring peace.
Last year, you may remember, I created a beach combing garden, that was both a powerful meditative focus as well as an opportunity for me to grieve lost opportunities over the summer. My most recent garden has come out of our present theme Time to Heal. And it has provided time for me to heal – healing in the creating, and in the contemplating.
Creating this garden began with prayerfully reading both my Litany for Healing and my previous Meditation Monday Does God Want to Heal Us?. My process was a little like Lectio Divina as I gathered the words and ideas that shimmered in my mind and allowed them to unfold in my imagination. So I decided I needed elements of preventative, curative and relational healing in my garden.
Aloe plant in contemplative garden
I started with an aloe plant and a piece of bark – the aloe plant used to soothe sunburn and heal wounds, possibly relieving heartburn as well; the bark reminding me that aspirin comes from the bark of the willow tree – both of them powerful examples of the powerful elements of healing God has placed in our world. Then I added a mask – so simple yet so effective in preventing the spread of disease. My next addition was my stethoscope – a symbol of the healing that comes to us through doctors and other health professionals, and a cross – the most powerful symbol of healing in the gospels. Then I added a cup and a small teapot , appropriately socially distanced of course – powerful symbols for me of the healing power of relationships and our willingness to sit (over a cup of tea of course) and listen to those who think very differently than we do. My final addition was 2 rocks – one with healing on it and the other with loved reminding me that the elements of healing that are present in our world are all symbols of God’s love and desire to heal.
details of Time to Heal Garden
The garden sits on my desk. Each morning I light my circle of candles around my space and end by lighting a candle in the garden as I pray for those who have died of COVID and of violence in this last year. So the whole garden becomes a contemplative focus for both joy and grief, delight in the God who brings healing and grief for the pain that is still present in our world.
Perhaps you are not a passionate gardener like I am, but I encourage you to create a similar focus for your own daily contemplation that flows out of something you are passionate about. Tangible symbols like this don’t just help us to focus, they help us to connect to our own grief and to the love of God which is so incredibly woven into our world.
I so appreciate these beautiful contemplative services from St Andrews Episcopal Church in Seattle. Here is the contemplative service with music in the style-of-Taize for Epiphany 3 with Carrie Grace Littauer as prayer leader, and music by Kester Limner and Andy Myers. Enjoy
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