Journeying Together Through Lent!
Table Talk
Before we jump in…
This week begins our Lenten journey together. The season of Lent begins with Ash Wednesday and the imposition of ashes on the forehead and the hands. These ashes serve as a visible reminder that we are dust - finite and fragile, deeply flawed and yet, deeply beautiful.
Over the next eight weeks of Lent, our writers will offer stories of spiritual practices that have brought peace and openness to their lives, and that they hope might help you experience God in new ways in your own life. Our Lenten reflections will also include a journaling page that will prompt your continued daily reflections throughout the week.
We hope that each week is a reminder of the ways our lives are continually reshaped by our relationships with each other and with our loving God.
Setting the Table
You are welcome here. Come just as you are, bringing whatever is on your heart today. Take a few moments and allow yourself to just be. Take a couple deep breaths, grab yourself a cup of coffee, light a candle, do something that brings you comfort. Allow yourself to be present in this moment.
Consider how a piece of pottery is made unique by its slight imperfections.
Ring the bells that still can ring;
forget your perfect offering;
there is a crack in everything;
that's how the light gets in.
- Leonard Cohen
Jeremiah 18:1-6
Then the word of the Lord came to me. He said, “Can I not do with you as this potter does?” declares the Lord. “Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand.”
2 Corinthians 4:7-9
But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.
Food for Thought
One early summer day a number of years ago, my friend’s 8-year-old son was racing his bike with a group of his friends. In the spirit of Evel Knievel, he took his mark, set, and sped for the finish line - the stop sign at the end of the street. Only he didn’t stop. With a last burst of speed, he suddenly surged forward, eclipsing the cyclist next to him, crashing into a blur of blue Chevy.
The bike went down and my friend’s son shot up - landing 55 feet from the place of impact. After x-raying every inch of his body, the doctor was amazed to find only one broken bone.
My friend didn’t think her son had seen the truck coming down the street - but she was wrong. Her son later confessed that he had, in fact, seen it, but thought he could beat it.
I am often struck, as I watch my own children play, by the false sense of immortality that carries us through our childhood. Children move through the world with an emboldened sense of confidence, with reckless abandon - jumping from higher steps than they should - testing the limits of their ability - believing all the time that they are unstoppable, untouchable, unbreakable.
But we are not made to be immortal or unbreakable. Whatever else we believe about ourselves, however hard we might try to convince ourselves or the world around us otherwise, we are both limited and fragile.
We are made from dust.
We are the clay pots in which God has entrusted God’s treasure. Vulnerable human vessels shaped from the dirt of the ground and the dust of the stars to carry within us the breath and light of our creator.
And yet - we spend an incredible amount of energy trying to be anything other than this - anything other than fragile. Somewhere along our human journeys we’ve absorbed the message that we are not enough just as we are - clay pots; fragile vessels; vulnerable, human beings.
Vulnerability is the willingness to see our lives and truly be seen in our lives. It is absolutely terrifying, but allowing oneself to be seen and known - and allowing oneself to fully see and know another - is the core, the heart, the center, of meaningful human experience.
It is in our shared brokenness that we better understand our connection to and our dependence upon one another, and it is in our limitations that the intimacy, the love, the grace, the redemption of an ever loving God is made fully known.
When we allow our broken and healed places - our imperfections and our mistakes - to be known, it honors the fullness of our stories. It holds us accountable to our history. It recognizes the pain of our past. It holds sacred the arduous human journey of being and becoming - at every stage.
It is the means by which we are able to receive and experience grace. Like a potter with clay in her hands, God knows us intimately and is continually holding, reshaping, and mending the cracks within our lives.
We have to stop telling ourselves the story that we aren’t good enough.
We are worthy of being seen and known. Not in part, but in full. To see our full story - to see the full story of those around us - and to know that we are fully and completely, as we are, an integral part of the wonderful story of God - knowing that our lives are the treasures of God held in the fragile vessels of clay pots that are continually reshaped and mended, held in the loving hands of our potter and creator.
Each week in this season of Lent, we will provide a resource that offers seven daily thoughts of reflection that tie back into that week’s story, and also provides prompts for journaling. Feel free to print the journaling page, forward it to a friend, use it as inspiration for your own journaling practice (or group conversations), or maybe just a food for thought in your quiet time.
We hope you enjoy this journaling page for Journeying Together Through Lent!
Blessing
Loving God,
Like a potter with clay, you know us intimately.
The imprint of your hands make smooth our shape - and you are never finished crafting your beloved creation. In our living we are shaped and reshaped through the work and love of the potter.
A little Table Talk for your table...
Share together ways that you have felt “not good enough.” What has helped you find peace in those moments?
Take turns listing ways that you can remind one another of your worth.
Discuss how you can see God continually working in the cracks of your life to bring about a more beautiful creation.
Try taking it to the Kids Table...
Grab some molding clay or Play-Doh and let your kiddos create. Try to allow them the freedom to create without expectation.
Talk with them about what they have created. Point out some of the unique characteristics that make their work of art beautiful just the way it is.
Prompt your child to make a list of all of the things that make them unique. Talk about how each of those things is what makes them who they are.
Meet Our Welcoming Voice!
Lin Story-Bunce is a North Carolina native, and lovingly calls Greensboro, NC home. She earned a Masters of Divinity from Wake Forest University and has served a wonderful and thoughtful congregation at College Park Baptist Church since 2009, pastoring to families and their faith development. Most of all, Lin loves the moments she gets to connect with her family, snowboarding with her wife and keeping up with their four kiddos and two energetic pups. Lin is a teacher, preacher, dreamer, and procrastinator who, if you ask her youth group, has a knack for trying to do way too many things in far too little time.
To hear more from Lin throughout the week, follow along on our Instagram!
If you have a story that you would like to be included as a Reader's Write feature, we would love for you to send it our way! You can email us directly at thewelcometableco@gmail.com.
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