From the Pastor:

 

LENT

 

Lent: the snow melts and soon the daffodils will appear -- harbingers of spring.

 

Lent is a unique time of year; it is also unique on the church calendar. It lasts for a full 40 days. Christmas gets only 1 day, maybe 2 if you include Christmas Eve. Although the full Christmas season lasts for 12 days, but that's a whole season.

 

Such is much the same with Easter. Maybe the Saturday before and the Monday after get thrown in, but basically Easter Day itself is only one day and gets most of our attention. But then again there is the Easter season, and it lasts for 50 days. But itself: one day.

 

The same goes for St. Valentine's Day and St. Patrick's Day and Thanksgiving Day  (although because of travel plans Thanksgiving can range all the way from Wednesday through Sunday -- that's 5 days.)

 

But Lent is 40 days with each of those 40 days being as important as the other 39. Why all the attention? Perhaps because each of those days need all the attention that we can give it. There are a lot of things that we can do paying attention to Lent each Lenten day.There are a lot of things to tend to. Paying attention means to tend to something. Yes, that's giving it our attention, like in "Tend to business."

 

As a season of Penitence Lent calls us to tend to the business of making right what we have made wrong, making whole what we have broken. Look at it this way: here are 40 days set aside so that we stop looking away from what needs to be tended to, like as admitted, like as in "confessed", so that what is confessed may be forgiven, healed, restored, made whole again. Attended to.

 

The 40 days of Lent, each of those 40 days urges us, actually pleads with us, to look to Jesus and His cross for as much as it takes and for as long as it takes, for He is the One Who can get done for us what needs to be done.

 

So here are 40 days, 40 days in which we are right in the middle of right now: days for tending to what needs to be attended to. And I might add that this is a good discipline which if we get in on and are in the habit of doing, well, the wonders of Lent will grace all the rest of the days of the year.

 

Pastor David M. Albertin

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New Tracy, IN

8705 S 100 E

 WORSHIP SERVICE SUNDAY @ 9:00 AM.

MID WEEK LENTEN WORSHIP @ 6:30 PM on WEDNESDAY: March 5, 12, 19, 26 and April 2 & 9.

MAUNDY THURSDAY April 17 and

GOOD FRIDAY April 18 @ 6:30 PM.