This Lent, we embrace a theme of growth. We invite you to use our Lenten Prayer Station to grow closer to God. We invite you to give to our Lenten Outreach Project that gives toward growth. We invite you to explore any of our Lenten Resources to fuel your personal growth. We invite you to Stations of the Cross Fridays in Lent.
Lenten Prayer Station
Lent is a time to reflect on what keeps us from being close to God, a time for movement toward God by growing our faith. It’s a time to grow.
This Lent, we offer a prayer station in the back of the church by the stained glass windows, a place to spread before God our cares and desires. We invite, even challenge you, to put prayers there. Offer something to God that you and God can work on together. Maybe there’s something in your life you need to work on – a wound, a pain, or a hardness or obstacle. Maybe there’s a need in our community you want to address. Maybe there’s an opportunity you want to grasp that you need God’s help with. Offer these to God at the prayer station. Get a leaf, write a prayer, put the leaf up on the station.
Through each week, cultivate something related to the leaf prayer you offered. The soil you cultivate in your heart and life can nurture your growth. Perhaps develop a rhythm to offer your prayers to God, or a conscious companionship, to seek grace and see God alive in your life. Each week at church, revisit the prayer station, and be challenged to renew what you already offered to God or to offer something new. Our successes and failures, our gifts and shortcomings, are all equally the stuff of our prayers.
It is our hope that the prayer station will visually grow and change each week as our prayers flourish, and that through our faith, our lives may grow, blossom, and bear fruit.
Lenten Outreach Project
Growth in Lent isn’t just for us. It’s for our world, too. Time and again the people of St. Martin’s show that caring for others is rooted so deeply within us, it’s part of our congregation’s DNA! We continue our tradition of undertaking a bold Lenten outreach project that will help others far from us, in partnership with Episcopal Relief and Development’s Gifts for Life.
We want you to give money, generously, for trees, because of the impact they have on others and the world that God has created for us. We’ll explore this in Lent. We’ll ask you to be aware of where needs for reforestation are great, where humankind is harmful, of the role trees play in air and water quality, of the role trees play in mitigating climate change, and of the role trees have in our lives.
$1 gives one tree. $50 gives 50 trees. $100 gives 100 trees. $1000 gives 1000 trees. Reforestation is a successful and sustainable way to make an impact in a community, and the impact can live past each of us! Where disasters like hurricanes and wildfires have destroyed forests, or where man has removed them, mudslides threaten people. Restoring trees stabilizes and enriches the soil and lets local flora and fauna rejuvenate, rebuilding habitats and ecosystems.
You can give in several ways – in a donation jar in church, in an envelope you mark with “trees” and place in the plate, with a check you mark with “trees” in the memo field, or online.
Maybe our own restoration is fundamentally linked with the preservation and restoration of the natural world we inhabit and of which we ourselves are a part.
Lenten Resources
In this time of reflection and learning, you’ll find some interesting ways to grow here, including doodling your prayers with Praying in Color and the apostolic rumble or saintly smackdown that is Lent Madness:
https://www.stmartininthefields.org/lenten-resources-2018/