Dear God, before I start going through my Lenten devotional, Sacred Invitation: Lenten Devotions Inspired by the Book of Common Prayer, I want to say a quick anonymous prayer for a friend who contacted me yesterday about marital strife. Oh, Father, please speak to this man and his wife. I think there might be some mental illness involved. Please heal. I am sure there are decades of harm from both that need to be forgiven. Please administer your grace. Please give them a path forward. Please raise up people in their lives who can love them and be your physical presence for them. And Holy Spirit, please be their paraclete in every way. And show me what my role is in their lives.

Now, once again I forgot to look at yesterday’s PM psalms (49 and 53), so let me do that now.

Wow, I don’t think I’ve ever heard Psalm 49 used as prophecy for Jesus before, but I’m sure it has, but the verses that struck me were 7-9: No man can redeem the life of another or give to God a ransom for him–the ransom for a life is costly, no payment is ever enough–that he should live on forever and not see decay. Well, the you go. Thank you, Jesus, for being the ransom we could never have imagined!

Okay, here are today’s passages:

• AM Psalms: 50, 59, 60
• PM Psalms: 19, 46
• Deuteronomy 9:23-10:5
• John 3:16-21
• Hebrews 4:1-10

After reading all of these passages, I can’t say that much jumped out to me like it did from Psalm 49 earlier. The thing I thought most about while I read John 3:16-21 was that this was just a small part of Jesus’s private conversation/instruction with Nicodemus. In John 3:4, Nicodemus asked, “How can a man be born when he is old? Surely he cannot enter a second time into his mother’s womb to be born.” Then Jesus starts his response in verse 5 and continues through verse 21, except with Nicodemus inserting, “How can this be?” But it’s interesting for me to picture Jesus in this one-on-one setting. Just the two of them. The Messiah and an earnest Pharisee, talking. The former teaching the latter. The latter really trying to understand. I love it. And it somehow changes the words. They become more intimate and personal.

Father, Jesus was bringing a new paradigm that absolutely no one could understand–not even his mother. No one understood how he would shift the narrative. I still don’t understand it. And the modern church seems to lose its way on it. I know I have. Help me to sink into you. Help me to embrace your way. Help me to be about showing love first and foremost to every person with whom I interact today. I don’t need to be smart. I don’t need to be effective. I just need to be faithful to you and loving to others. Help me to die to myself and my own ego so that I might truly take up my cross and follow you.

I offer this prayer to you in Jesus, my savior, and with the Holy Spirit, my paraclete,

Amen