We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.
A Blessing for Ash Wednesday
Sarah (Rosenau) Korf via Compfight
For those of you observing the Lenten season (and for those of you who are not), we thought we would share this poem by Jan Richardson.
Rend Your Heart
A Blessing for Ash Wednesday
To receive this blessing,
all you have to do
is let your heart break.
Let it crack open.
Let it fall apart
so that you can see
its secret chambers,
the hidden spaces
where you have hesitated
to go.
Your entire life
is here, inscribed whole
upon your heart’s walls:
every path taken
or left behind,
every face you turned toward
or turned away,
every word spoken in love
or in rage,
every line of your life
you would prefer to leave
in shadow,
every story that shimmers
with treasures known
and those you have yet
to find.
It could take you days
to wander these rooms.
Forty, at least.
And so let this be
a season for wandering
for trusting the breaking
for tracing the tear
that will return you
to the One who waits
who watches
who works within
the rending
to make your heart
whole.
Category: General
Tags: Ash Wednesday, Easter, Jan Richardson, Lent, Prayer, Repentance
Related Reading
A Brief Theology of Hearing God
It is sometimes assumed by modern readers that when believers in the Bible heard a message or saw a vision while praying, it was something people perceived with their physical eyes and heard with their physical ears. If anyone else had been present with these believers when they heard God speak or received their vision,…
8 Arguments for the Reality of the Resurrection
James Emery via Compfight As we come up on Easter many ask questions about the reliability of the resurrection story. Was it a legend? Did the early church fabricate it? Can we trust what we read in the Bible and what we hear preached? Greg has written extensively on this topic. In his best-selling…
Jessica Kelley: Triumph by Testimony
Jessica Kelley is a good friend of ReKnew, and she preached this last weekend at Woodland Hills Church. Normally we only post clips of sermons, but we wanted to post the full sermon on this occasion. We feel like Jessica’s testimony about how her picture of God helped her through the death of her son…
Guest Post: Reasons Why You Should Pray More
Despite the fact that the Bible is full of prayerful people, most churches today don’t pray very much at all. In fact, we barely talk about prayer, even though it’s one of the most foundational pieces of the Christian faith. I recently went on a 37,000-mile prayer pilgrimage around the world, a modern re-working of…
Tardy
This is the sermon clip entitled Honest to God that should have appeared last week. Sorry. Sometimes life gets a bit busy. In this short sermon clip, Greg introduces the idea that one of our base needs is to be understood and loved fully for who we are. The full sermon discusses how in order…
Confessions of a Christian Nation: Native American/First Nations Oppression
In this third part of the Confessions series, Brian Zahnd, Brian McLaren, Bruxy Cavey and Greg Boyd confess the sins of the Christian church against the Native American and First Nations people. Thanks to Rex Harsin for his work and vision in producing this series.