Mar 30 | The First Station: Prayer

2013-03-20_21-28-09_811Many of us are taught, throughout our whole lives, that we need to be strong and stand up for ourselves. The values of our society point to a “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps” thinking that sees the weak as disposable and prayer as useless. In a world like this, we may learn to appear like a rock on the outside, but inside, we may be falling apart.

Lent is about recognizing and embracing our fallen-ness, weakness, and mortality. We take responsibility for the places where we have failed – personally and as a species – to act with integrity, stand up for justice, and live with humility. Our hopelessness may be from different sources, but they are all tied to the same human sense of despair. Maybe we betrayed someone. Maybe someone was dying and there was nothing we could do to save them. Maybe we were slaves to addiction. Whatever was happening to us, we were in a place where we found ourselves alone in our Garden of Gethsemane at night, and our sweat became like great drops of blood. We were bowed down under the weight of our fear and asked God to take away the pain that rested on us, or the pain that we knew was to come…and knew in our hearts that it wouldn’t happen.

What we might not have known at the time was that the pain was the beginning of a longer journey that somehow, against all odds, ended on a misty, troubling, beautiful morning.2013-03-20_21-27-59_405

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