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The Lenten Trail
Accompaniment on any journey can bring such comfort. It is a pleasure to once again step into the Lenten season within your good company. All are welcome on our Sunday afternoon walks. This year’s Lenten theme is all about our connections to the environment we live in, so there is no better way to begin than to experience it first hand out on the trails.

Along with our Lenten reflections each week, we will be introducing a fast practice with a twist to nurture our spirits and spark our imaginations. The resource we are using for these explorations is, A DifferentKind of Fast: Feeding Our True Hungers in Lent, by Christine Valters Paintner.

This week you are invited to consider a fast from scarcity anxiety, to embrace abundance. This may well be a difficult challenge to get us started. Our culture is constantly telling us we don’t have enough, and we ourselves are not enough, without the latest and greatest of everything. That’s what keeps the consumer economy going. Within our faith community though, we embrace the opposite message. Within God’s love and grace, you are already enough, and you have what you
need. We will always continue to change, grow, learn, and yes, consume, but our theology of abundance assumes a balance of giving and taking in ways that will bring about healing and restoration.

Living our lives from the perspective of abundance opens up our gratitude for what we already have and takes away the anxiety and fear that drives our accumulation of things. We also need to be reminded from time to time of our personal gifts
and the skills we have developed over time, which help us navigate the challenges we face. We are already enough for what we need in this moment. Let’s be grateful for the abundance within and all around us.


Peace and joy,
Nancy