A Journey of the Heart: Meditations for Lent

By Lynn Dean Hunter and Beverly Foote

Lent prepares us to open our hearts to the magnificence and wonder of Christs atonement and resurrection. We bring our humanity, pockmarked as it is with sins of omission and commission, only to discover that we are Gods beloved, recipients of an undeserved but grace-filled stature too wonderful to comprehend. Nothing we do can ever make God love us more; at the same time, nothing we do can ever make God love us less. And nothing in this world or the next can ever separate us from that love.

This book offers an armchair pilgrimage, a journey of the heart. Individuals or groups who commit to spiritual growth will find this book helpful not only during Lent but at other times as well.

Prayers, scripture readings, and meditations for each weekday of Lent, are appropriate for Christians of all denominations. Propers, selected from Common Feasts and Fasts, begin with the Thursday after Ash Wednesday and end with the start of Holy Week. Sundays, traditionally a celebration of Christs resurrection, are not included.

Questions at the end of each meditation invite the reader or group to reflect, discuss, draw, or write journal responses and to receive in a new, transforming way the unending story of Gods love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Sep 30, 2010
• ISBN: 9781450260213

Lynn Dean Hunter

Beverly Foote, a graduate of Rutgers University and the Bread Loaf School of English, Middlebury College, also studied writing at Lincoln College, Oxford; the University of Virginia; and the University of the South. A lifelong Episcopalian, she studied the Old and New Testaments through Sewanees Education for Ministry. Her book of poems, Sheets, won the Christian Choice Book Award for poetry in 2008. As an English teacher at Norfolk Academy, she was selected to be a schoolteacher fellow at the University of St. Andrews. During her stay in Scotland, she recorded impressions that she later reframed as meditations for Lent, with the help of Lynn Dean Hunter, author, editor, and adjunct professor of English at the University of Phoenix.

Book preview

Thursday after Ash Wednesday

Direct us, O Lord, in all our doings with your most gracious favor, and further us with your continual help; that in all our works begun, continued, and ended in you, we may glorify your holy Name, and finally, by your mercy, obtain everlasting life; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Psalm 1

Deuteronomy 30:15-20

Luke 9:18-25

Those who delight in the law of the Lord …are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do not wither. In all that they do, they prosper. Psalm 1:2-3

Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him, for that means life to you… Deuteronomy 30: 20

The distance between the head and the heart can be far. While I know in my head that God promises His beloved children works that prosper, fruit in due season, and leaves that never wither, at times in my life I have felt nothing but loss. Who at midlife has not felt that something is dying? We sense a transition but do not know where it will lead. Surely, I felt this way when on the heels of my father’s death, I was diagnosed with