Lent 2025 started on Wednesday, March 5 with Ash Wednesday.
On that day Pastor Lori Pankratz and I visited friends and parishioners at Heartland #1, assisted living, and Eventide Heartland Nursing Home. It’s always fun to visit with them for us and we brought them ashes for their foreheads, scripture, prayer and communion for their spirits. It was a good visit at both places with about 20 people participating between the two locations.
Dodging colds and flu and Covid 19 – it has been a number of months since we were able to do this visiting together and it did my heart good to reach out to these beloved people.
That same evening at St. Olaf we held our own Ash Wednesday service which started with mentoring meetings with our youth in various stages of Confirmation and a hearty Lenten meal served by parents and youth.
The remainder of Lent we’ll have the mentoring meetings, Lenten meals and Holden Evening Prayer services that feature dramatic readings by Youth volunteers. The meals begin at 5:30 p.m. and Evening Prayer at 6:30 p.m. – you’re welcome to come join us any Wednesday evening of Lent.
I’ve been looking for something special to do myself for Lent to help with my own experience of Lent. Sometimes I give something up – like watching TV or eating chocolate. Sometimes I add something like reading through the Old Testament or the New Testament. This year I am focusing my own spending on locally owned businesses.
As consumer confidence fluxuates – are we heading to a Recession or aren’t we? I have decided to consciously pare down my own spending and focus it only on small businesses, especially locally owned businesses. In a way you might say I am doing my own mini-protest of conditions we are facing in the USA.
Although I am a child of the 1960’s I never participated in a protest march. Our country has a long and varied history of protests – many peaceful expressions of disatisfaction – many turning into violent conflicts. What can one 72-year old woman do to express disatisfaction with the status quo? She can zip her coin purse shut and pare her spending down – they talk about “consumer confidence” in the news – well, my own personal consumer confidence is almost non-existant.
Therefore I am taking the 40 days of Lent to stage my very own boycott of big business and turning to locally owned businesses only. Maybe I will have to pay a little more than I would have at a big box store, but I want to do something to help me try to make sense of some the craziness that’s coming out of Washington and our political parties. That’s what my Lent is going to be all about for 2025.
