At the beginning of worship, two youth held up glittery signs with the words TEMPTATION and TRUST. I made the following announcement:
Today’s worship is brought to us by the words TEMPTATION and TRUST. Watch and listen for these two words as we sing, pray, and read together. You could even try doing a bit of a word search in your bulletin and try to underline or circle each of those words every time you see them.
Thanks to Worshiping with Children for the original idea.
During Children's Time, we read, The Great Fuzz Frenzy by Janet Stevens and Susan Stevens Crummel. It's a story about a group of prairie dogs who become so obsessed with tennis ball fuzz that it nearly destroys their community. Later, in the service I invited the congregation to think about the "fuzz" in their lives: the "stuff that distracts/gets in the way of their relationship with God and each other" and made the following suggestion:
To help free us from that fuzz I’ve got the perfect tool. It’s a lint brush. Now that’s lint L-I-N-T brush but in all seriousness I do want to share with you a way that this might be used as a tool for prayer this Lenten season. If you have one of these at home, grab it and spend some time talking with God about the fuzz in your life that you need to be freed from. And as you do roll the lint roller over yourself and remember that God loves you and forgives you and frees you.
Here's where the idea came from:
| Lent or Lent |
During my sermon, Jesus and the devil made an appearance in a liturgical dramatization: Beneath the Desert Sun.
Everyone took home a Lenten Heart with Scripture references. I invited folks to pick a passage to commit to hear this Lenten season:
(Note: Quotations in this post are from my sermon "Temptation and Trust" give on Feb. 17, 2013 ). . . so that when you too enter into the lonely desert, those places of testing in your own life, you too may be reminded of God’s gracious presence at the heart of it all.