Lent Words 2019 Day 1 ~ Sacred Time

Lent Words Day 1: Wander

I love the verse from the song Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing which speaks of our natural tendency for our hearts to wander from God. Today's Scripture passage, Romans 7:14-25, captures this struggle as well.

Oh, to grace how great a debtor

Daily I'm constrained to be.

Let that goodness like a fetter

Bind my wandering heart to Thee.

Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,

Prone to leave the God I love.

Here's my heart, oh, take and seal it,

Seal it for Thy courts above.

My word for the year is sacred. I'm using the season of Lent as an opportunity  to re-connect with the practices of Sabbath on Fridays, a day each week to focus on sacred time in a season of sacred time. So I'm practicing Lent Words with reflection and creativity, and joining Shelly Miller on #sabbathforlent.

I had this idea floating around in my head to make church windows out of collage, so I gave it a try today. The method I chose was quite time consuming, so I'm going to play around with it over the net few days of Lent Words.

My "D" page for our Living Your Word group A-Z inspiration challenge. I chose the word "do".  

Participate in Lent Words 2019

• Download the March words calendar here. The April calendar will be added in a few weeks.
• Join the Words Challenge Facebook group to share your art, your experiences and join the conversation.  https://www.facebook.com/groups/Wordschallengegroup/ref=bookmarks
• Participate on Instagram with the hashtag #lentwords2019. You'll also find a words list there.

OR

Join Our Inspirational Facebook Group: Living Your Word of the Year

Bernice Hopper, Valerie Sjodin and I facilitate a Facebook group about Living your Word of the Year. In it we share insights through blog posts and connect with other like-hearted and like-minded people who want to live out a word focus throughout the year. We offer participants a bi-weekly A-Z Inspiration to help prompt reflection and creativity. as well as other inspirational ways to connect with your word of the year. If you would like to connect with others in creative ways about living your word throughout the year, explore new ideas, record thoughts, prayers, and events, you are invited to join our Facebook group.

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/203309083575277/

Please use #livingyourword2019 on social media.

Check out the other blogs:
Bernice: www.newlycreative.com
Valerie: www.valeriesjodin.com/blog

Everyday Journal Update

So far, just six weeks into the year, I am enjoying the challenge of doing most of my art and recording of insights for my word for the year in one journal. The "challenge" part for me is that I love to make (and start) journals and handmade books, so combining everything in one journal doesn't leave much room for making new journals. But I'm committed!

Here a a few of the pages I've worked on over the past few weeks:

My word for 2018 is FLOW. Each year I am amazed at how picking a word for the year ends up being a filter through which you see so many other things. The word,  or the concept of the word and my intentions for it seems to pop up everywhere. Last week I was digging deeper into the context of a passage we had been discussing in a sermon prep meeting. The passage was Hebrews 12:3-13, which will be the focus of the message in our worship service tomorrow at church. I was struck by so much in our conversation surrounding this passage that I decided to look a bit more into the context, which took me back to the verses preceding it. As I studied Hebrews 12:1-2 my word popped up.

"Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God."

Now, my word flow does not appear in this passage. But one of the main reasons I chose this word was that I want to live more in the flow of God's Spirit this year, and as I read these verses I was struck with a thought that was connected with my word: I cannot live in the flow of God's Spirit if I am hindered or weighed down and entangled, both by the things in life that weigh me down and/or by the sin I struggle with. I also think that my practice through Lent may come out of this revelation in some way. We'll see. Anyway, I enjoy how my word will pop up when least expected. I also love how living and active the Word of God is in our lives when we delve into it!

Of course, I respond with art and recording it in my Everyday Journal, so that I take it deeper and have a reminder of how God spoke to me through these verses.

I wrote a bit of hidden thoughts under the tag.

Six weeks into 2018! On some level it's hard to believe that this amount of time has already passed. On another level it also feels like it has already been 2018 for quite some time! I hope the new year so far has been filled with revelation and inspiration for you, in faith and in art. How are you doing with your word this year? We have conversations going on about our Everyday Journals and our word for the year over in the Everyday Journals ~ Living Out Your Word for the Year Facebook group. Join us!

Join Our Inspirational Facebook Group

Bernice Hopper, Valerie Sjodin and I are using one journal to record events, experiences and relationships and  to explore our word’s meaning in visual and fun ways. We are each blogging about our experiences and our art. If you would like to connect with others about creatively organizing your word, your ideas, thoughts, prayers, events, or your projects all in one journal, you are invited to join our Facebook group: Everyday Journals – Living Your Word of the Year.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/203309083575277/

Hashtags on Instagram: #everydayjournals2018, #livingyourword2018

Check out the other blogs:

Bernice: http://www.newlycreative.com/

Valerie: https://valeriesjodin.com/blog/

Also, join us for Lent Words 2018 -  A Creative Challenge Through the Season of Lent. More about it in this post. There is also a private Facebook group for the Lent challenge:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/LentWords/

Advent, Sacred Time and My One Little Word

For the past few weeks I have been preparing for my annual Advent art project. An art project during the Advent season is a practice I started six years ago as a way to redeem the Christmas season. There were a few reasons why I needed to redeem this season for myself. First, I had worked in the hospitality and retail industries for 25 years. These industries make a good portion of their income off of the Christmas season so they spend a lot of time marketing it and doing so well in advance of the actual holiday. After years of having Christmas carols and decorations beginning 6-8 weeks in advance, by the time the actual holiday came along I was anything but in the holiday spirit. It took a number of years after I left those industries in 2002 to begin to even have a desire to embrace the Christmas season, and when I did I didn't want it to be in the materialistic manner our culture tends to promote. At about the same time our church began adding an Advent moment into the service. Enter the Advent art project. That year (2011) two things took place: I started my first Advent art project as a way to slow down and dig into the meaning and the story of the season. The second thing that took place was the start of this blog on December 26, 2011. I published the following quote on my first blog post:

“…To paint a picture or to write a story or to compose a song is an incarnational activity.”  Creating art is taking Love, Truth, the spiritual, and making them ‘in carne’–in the flesh.  Creating art is taking Love, Truth, the spiritual, and incarnating them that we might see them and experience them more clearly.

Madeleine L'Engle, Walking On Water: Reflections On Faith and Art

This quote about art being incarnational really sums up the role art journaling has played in redeeming the Christmas season for me over the past six years. Each year as I have expressed the various Scripture passages or quotes or hymn and songs through art and in writing on this blog, the deeper meanings of Advent and looking ahead to the coming of Christ have worn away the cynical and tired parts of my heart and soul..

As I said, there were a few reasons the Christmas season needed to be redeemed for me. The other reason is that for most of my life I have had an aversion to traditions. Traditions, such as observing holidays, usually did not go well in the dysfunctional family of my childhood. In fact, more times than not they ended up in chaos and pain. The other traditions we observed in my childhood were those of the Catholic church. This church was not a place of compassion and support for my mother as she went through the struggles of alcohol abuse with my dad and subsequently a divorce in my early teen years. Once I began my own faith journey in my late twenties I found myself angry with the Catholic church and its rituals which I felt were empty and hypocritical. - Please don't let me offend anyone who is Catholic, this is just a part of MY story.-  I don't want to dwell on or dig too deeply into my issues with traditions or the Catholic church, because over the past 28 years since I became a Christ-follower God has slowly been about His work of redemption. Redemption is God's story. He redeems people to Himself through Christ and then begins the lifelong process of redeeming the hurts and trials and false perceptions that exist within us.

~ Redemption is God's story.

So, now, this all leads me to where I am today. We are coming to the close of another year and the start of the Advent season is just a week away. Over the past few weeks as I have been planning for this year's Advent art project and reflecting on how this practice has been so redemptive for me, I began to wonder if the same could be true on a larger scale. You see, in addition to the above mentioned issues I had regarding the Christmas season, I have also avoided participating in many of the other "Christian" traditions, such as Lent. In part because historically many Evangelical churches have not observed the Christian calendar for the most part, with the exception of Christmas and Easter. But I think, for me, there has been other issues from my childhood connected to these days/holidays as well. So as I was reflecting on this my friend, Jean, showed me the picture of a n artistic liturgical calendar, mainly for its artistic value. Jean has a heart for the liturgical and has played a huge role in our church connecting with some of the traditions that have not been observed in the past, such as Advent and Lent. Jean has been very understanding of my feelings about these traditions and has never been one to push me outside of any comfort zones I was uncomfortable with leaving. She has been my traveling companion as I have embraced Advent. When she showed me the liturgical calendar I was struck with the thought that maybe if I journeyed through the rest of the Christian calendar in the same manner I have with Advent, I may experience redemption and healing in other ways as well.

This year, 2018, I am going to change my annual practice (um, tradition) of picking a word for the year and instead I am going to pick a phrase: Sacred Time. I am going to travel through the Christian calendar year and art journal and blog my way through it. Even as I think about this, it doesn't seem too foreign to me. After all, a calendar simply marks the cycle of rhythms or seasons. And I have found the rhythms of Sabbath and spiritual practices to be very healthy and formative habits in my life. I am setting my word/phrase for 2018 now, since one of the first things I have learned in reading about the Christian calendar is that Advent is the beginning of the Christian year.

I wrote about my Advent art journal project for this year in my last post, which you can read here. I have put together a project called Advent Words which will be live on my blog on December 1st. There will be a word for each day of Advent with some accompanying Scripture passages which can be used as a prompt for art journaling, photography, poetry, or any other creative form. 

Join me! We have already begun the conversation in the Advent Words 2017 Facebook Group.