Join us this Lenten Season
We invite you to join us as we enter this holy lenten season. This year, we will use the devotional series The Hardest Part by author Kate Bowler to guide us over the next 40 days. You can download the devotional at the button below.
Each day, the devotional will explore the hardest parts of being human—heartbreak, emptiness, shame, and longing—and acknowledge the weight of it. You’ll find Scripture, a reflection, a response prompt, and a blessing to remind you that grace has a way of sneaking in, even when life feels impossible.
A Note from Kate Bowler
Life is this strange, tender mix, isn’t it?
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.
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.