03-07-25

ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHINGS
March 7, 2025
With Ash Wednesday, we not only entered the Season of Lent, but for those of us at Cypress Creek Christian Church, we entered into a period of intentional awakening. The hope is to extend an invitation to awaken, though not simply in a stretch and get the kinks out of your back kind of awakening. We are talking about an awakening within us. After the Ash Wednesday Service, we planted seeds in some planters that are going to be hanging out on either side of the Forum Building. Many of the plants (flowers, herbs, and vegetables) are to reach maturity in 35-50 days. Lent is 40 days, plus Sundays. So if everything happens as we think it should happen, we are hoping to experience an awakening of color, a savoring of good flavor, and the taste of that first ripened produce around Holy Week. Awakening can relate to so many different things, and this Sunday, we are going to focus on an Awakening of Gratitude. In Colossians 2:7, Paul wrote, “…and overflow with thanksgiving just as you were taught.” This idea of being taught is not necessarily to be thought of as a classroom where a teacher lectures on the finer points of gratitude. The most important life lessons came to us by example, by watching those who did know they were being watched. Their lives of thankful inspired or awakened within us our spirit of gratitude. Who might that have been for you?

I celebrate this day, Great God of Heaven, for those whose lives were spilling forth with an abundance of thankfulness, and I happened to have been in the splash zone and felt the power of their gratitude. You are the inspiration of that abundance, and what I have witnessed has and continues to awaken something within me. Amen.