Conklin-Broad Avenue-North News

March Newsletter                         

Dear friends,

We head whole heartedly into the season of Lent. We are reminded on a weekly basis and sometimes more often of our human condition. The Christian Church, following in the tradition of our Hebrew forbearers, has always deemed it appropriate to take a good long hard look at ourselves. For some of us this comes naturally and we do so without outside influence or urging. For others of us we really do need this reminder and this challenge because we find it so much easier and pleasurable to measure everyone else’s human condition. We are really good at clarifying where others are wrong and where they need to improve. Like the man in the parable Jesus shared, it is easy for us to check the speck in another’s eye while ignoring the log in our own.

Your leadership has covenanted to consider the older brother in the parable we call the Prodigal Son. So many of us in the Church are a lot like that Older Brother – you know the one- the one who was ticked at his father for welcoming his worthless son back home: quick to judge and quick to claim credit for being as close to perfect as anyone can be. It is an occupational hazard for those of us who have worked so hard to be perfect Christians for so many years.

One of the lessons of the parable is that God never loved anyone because they were perfect. He loves us because we are His. We never stopped belonging to Him. We have never been outside the realm of His love. We have never ever come close to being perfect and He knows that. Sometimes we forget.

Lent allows us to remember that in our imperfection the richness of God’s perfect love touches us even more deeply. The distance that God came running to us in the person and work of Jesus Christ is more readily apparent when we are able to recognize how far we have wandered.

May this season of Lent be one where we not only see ourselves more clearly but one where we see how much we are loved even more clearly.

In Christ’s love,