What I do know is that light lives within us, because God lives within us.
If light lives within us, then hope lives within us.
If hope lives within us, fear doesn’t win.

That warm, fierce, fresh & tough love C.S. Lewis mentions, though — that is the love that a) lives within us since God lives within us; and b) is the kind that makes looking past different ideologies, hurtful actions, and horrible Facebook posts possible.

When was the last time you let yourself be ministered to? The last time you said, “yes, that’d be great, thank you,” when God sent someone in your path to teach you something, to help you with something, to ease a burden on your heart? Our angels might look a whole lot different than they did in Jesus’ day, but they still absolutely exist.

Feasting, on the other hand. Well, that is always my jam. And what Trevor Hudson goes on to talk about is that fasting is feasting. Feasting “on God’s overwhelming goodness and love for us.” Setting one thing aside makes room for something else, right? Fasting anything — food, social media, phone time, computer time, podcasts, music, a habit (good or not) — makes room for something else. I can get behind that all day long.

Life is not about being perfect. It’s about allowing the “extras” that come along for the ride as God works on making us our complete selves as He intended for us to be. We pray for patience, but we also have the chance to be kind and generous. We pray for wisdom to make good choices, but we also have the chance for diligence and dependability. We pray for peace, but we also have the chance to practice rest and trust.

God loves to welcome us home. The devotions from today in both Pauses and Preparing for Easter talk about the graciousness of redemption, of how the redeeming quality of humanity brings us home to God in a way we never would have experienced had Eve not taken that darn apple.

Now, 23 years later, the ashes make me think of being made from God’s soil. God didn’t just create us in His image, but He created us from the earth He created. He created us from His soil, His land. To be created from His land, His soil, is a new concept for me that I’ve rolled around in my heart today.

Much like the Advent season, when I stopped attending the Catholic church and started in a mainstream Evangelical church, I stopped learning about the reverence of these seasons. And I want to. I want to learn about and practice the reverence of these seasons.

I want to stop clenching my jaw.
I want to laugh more.
I want to rest.