Life is a strange mix. There is both joy and grief; big wins and big failures. We hold on to the good moments but then the phone rings, a diagnosis comes down, and we’re reminded once again that everything is much more fragile than we thought. Lent is the season of the church year when we stop pretending and face the truth: life is fragile, and so are we.
Lent begins with Ash Wednesday (March 5, 2025) when a pastor says words that I am uncomfortable in saying and no one really wants to hear out loud: “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” It’s not the kind of Bible verse you’d frame and put on a wall in your home, but it’s a truth we need.
So Lent invites us to stop pretending we can hold it all together and instead sit with the weight of what we carry—the regrets, the messes we can’t change no matter how hard we try. Here’s the hardest part: to be human and Christian is to carry the weight of our own fragile lives.
However—and here is what we can never forget—we do so with Jesus Christ our Lord. Jesus, who we look to for hope and healing, suffers and dies. His pain is real—just like ours. So we sit in the wilderness with him, acknowledging how hard life can be, facing the heartbreak, the messes—all of it. What will we find? It’s in those places where Christ meets us with the promise, “In my dying is your rising.”
Come, join us, for Lent and for Holy Week, as we travel once again from death to life and life beyond death.
—Pastor Mark Nelson
Daily Devotional Booklet
Our Lenten walk begins on Ash Wednesday, March 5th. The good news? We don’t walk Lent alone. Your fellow walkers in faith here at Peace have, with Bible in one hand and their own lives in another, described our walk with Jesus in our congregation’s annual Lenten Daily Devotional Booklet.
Lenten Wednesday Worship
March 12, March 19, March 26, April 2 and April 9 at 6:30pm
“Pain Seeking Understanding”
Ellen Charry teaches theology at Princeton Seminary. In her commentary on the Book of Psalms, she suggests that the subtitle for the book of Psalms could be, “Pain Seeking Understanding.” This subtitle came from her own experience. Her husband Dana, a psychiatrist, died of lung cancer in 2003. Never a smoker, his diagnosis was sudden and his decline quick. After his death, Charry published an essay entitled on lament. In the essay, as what she called “a case-study in trust and lament,” Charry included some of the letters her husband wrote to family and friends as he navigated “the vale of death’s shadow.” What’s helpful about his letters is how even as he documents his ongoing frustration and grief that his prayers have not been answered in the manner he hoped. Even so, Dana Charry nonetheless experienced a new awareness of the faithfulness and life with Jesus Christ.
Our primary text in this series will be the well-known and well-loved Psalm 23 but we will also venture into other Biblical texts and stories, all in an effort to deepen our prayer life, our faith in Jesus Christ, and—as Charry named it—deepen understanding in our pain. Our evening worship will use the Holden Evening Prayer setting.
A Lenten supper will precede midweek worship. Supper will be served from 5:30-6:15pm. $5/person or $15/family.
—Pastor Mark Nelson
Lenten Dinners
- 3/12/2025: Pork Tenderloin
- 3/19/2025: Greek Chicken
- 3/26/2025: Pasta Bar
- 4/2/2025: Walking Tacos
- 4/9/2025: Breakfast for dinner
Holy Week And Easter Worship
- Palm Sunday, April 14: 9:30am
- Maundy Thursday, April 17: 7pm
- Good Friday, April 18: 7pm
- Easter Sunday, April 20: 9:30am and 11:15am