Mama Mondays

This was an email from Margaret Feinberg (author and Bible study leader) last week after Easter, and I thought it was so good to consider how the season of Easter can be just as powerful as the season of Lent to lean into.  "This week, I've been meditating on this incredible time in the church calendar— the 50-day journey leading up to Pentecost.  There's something so special about this season of preparation.   Did you know that Pentecost was originally aligned with the ancient Feast of Weeks?  This celebration came exactly 49 days (7 weeks + 1 day) after Passover and coincided with the first grain harvest of the season. (And the giving of the law at Mt. Sinai.)    Now the Bible was written in an agrarian context where people were intimately aware of their dependence on God for every morsel of food. Those ancient farmers understood something we often forget in our modern conveniences—the profound reality of waiting on God's provision.   I believe this ...

  a post below for you from the beloved Barbara Brown Taylor- sign up for her free newsletter on Substack!  How to Find Your Footing My size 9 feet have been unremarkable for most of my life, though I have never taken them for granted since my Grandma Lucy lost both of hers to diabetes when I was seven. After that, I begged her to let me help take off her legs at night, holding the toeless wooden feet in my hands like Prince Charming before she told me to lean them against the wall and get into bed until one of us fell asleep. I could tell the story of my life in shoes. First, there were the white T-straps from the shoe store in College Park, Georgia, where a man in a suit and tie asked me to slide my feet into an X-ray machine so he could check the fit. Looking down through the glass panel on top, we could both see all the bones in my feet like the shoes weren’t even there. After that came the penny loafers of elementary school, the hippie moccasins of high school, the Earth ...

Such good theology below from this newsletter as we get ready for Easter!  (not just for kids!!)  Kids + Faith / Meredith Miller ( Meredith Miller is a children's pastor and she recently wrote a book called  Woven:  Nurturing a Faith Your Kid Doesn't Have to Heal from)  Hello! I'm SO EXCITED about today's newsletter. While I'm not a kids pastor anymore, I still share a sentiment from that time:  it’s never too early to start thinking about Easter! Everyone is thrilled think about Christmas. Twinkle lights! Babies! It’s all good. Then Easter hits. Violence! Fancy theological jargon about what it means! Less good. Add to that how many of us were given a heap of theological assertions that we were told  are the way  to understand Easter. Then we tell kids those answers. Here are the 5 key questions and the answers I hear over and over and over, from Easter lessons to kids Bible stories.   1: What is Easter? Easter is when Jesus died fo...

I got to go to a  Taizé  retreat on Saturday, and this is something that I wrote as a reflection from the morning prayer time.  I thought you would appreciate this little window into some of the things I'm thinking about. (By the way, this kind of thing with journaling is more of how I am marking this transition time rather than getting a butterfly tattoo. 🦋)   💙 This life is a classroom. We are here to learn to love. That’s it. All the lessons, all the failures, all the disappointments, all the celebrations, all the joys, all the encounters, all the possibilities, are part of our curriculum. We are learning and unlearning. We are growing. We are always on the way. We are here to learn to love. Lord, keep us soft and continue to help us to hold tenderly this day this earth this family these friends these enemies. We are here to learn to love. Beloved is where we begin and we are learning again and again to return to that. We are here to learn to love- to turn ...