Lent Pilgrimage Week 1

What would you say if I were to ask you to define a story? Perhaps a story is an account of events or incidents. You might tell me it is a narrative of what happened when… We all know a story when we read or see one on the screen but defining it is a little more difficult.

As an author, I write stories. Stories that lead the characters and the readers towards the truth of God and about themselves. In my novel Leaving Bethany, I tell the story of Martha who invited Jesus into her home and became a disciple. She followed Jesus into Jerusalem to see the crowds waving and was at his arrest and trial. She witnessed his death and went to the tomb early on Sunday morning when everything changed. She was part of Jesus’s story, and he invites us to take our place in his continuing story.

The life of each of us is a story, with a beginning, middle and end, and we are all part of God’s redemptive story. Jesus came into our world and lived amongst us, dying, rising and redeeming us. The Christian life can be understood as more of a story than a philosophy or religion. We live through our lives facing trials, and discomforts, with highs and lows along the way.

Lent is traditionally a time of prayer and self-reflection for Christians. It lasts for over six weeks from Ash Wednesday and ends the day before Easter Sunday. This season of self-denial and facing up to difficulties evoke the sense of pilgrimage, where we leave behind our creature comforts, to journey towards an encounter with God in a different way than usual. The Christian life can be described as a pilgrimage or a journey. As we shift our attention away from our own needs and onto God’s presence.

Ash Wednesday is the first day of Lent and reminds us of our mortality and the need to be put right with God. Many Christians observe the day with fasting, and some church traditions will make the sign of the cross in ash across people’s foreheads.

No pilgrimage is ever solitary and neither is the Christian life, so it will be lovely to journey with you this Lent as we travel towards the cross and the tomb. Along the way, we will stop and read short excerpts from Leaving Bethany. Next week we journey to Jerusalem and the beginning of Jesus’s journey to the cross.

Photo by Ahna Ziegler on Unsplash

Photo by Raul Petri on Unsplash

Photo by Billy Pasco on Unspalsh

Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash

This was to be the pivotal point in my life. There was my life before that moment, and now there is my life after that moment. Jesus stood and looked at me with those penetrating brown eyes.

“My dear Martha,” he said, “you’re worried and upset about the work you consider necessary. Do you know what’s important in life? There’s only one thing, and Mary has found it. So, I will not take it away from her.”

If that was not surprising enough, he held out his hand. “Why don’t you come and join us?”

Leaving Bethany page 4