Lent

Daddy’s Funeral & My Inheritance

February 14, 2016 by Edie Wadsworth 21 Comments

wVlfnlTbRtK8eGvbnBZI_VolkanOlmez_005

From my Lenten study which you can download for free. Don’t worry that you’re a few days behind, you can work through it at your own pace. I pray you will be blessed these 40 days.

Click Here to Download

Day 4: Give Me What Is Coming to Me
Texts: Psalm 12:1-6, Gen. 3:1-24, Mark 2:1-17 {Luke 15: 11-12}

“And Jesus said, “There was a man who had two sons. And the younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give the the share of the property that is coming to me.’ And he divided his property between them.”

My sister and I split the cost of my Daddy’s funeral.

I was 27 years old with two kids in my 3rd year of medical school when he died. I was on my psychiatry rotation and was beginning to wonder what it would be like when I finally went crazy. (That’s a chapter in my memoir, for what it’s worth.)
Not only was there no inheritance to be had, there was no life insurance either. Right before he got lung cancer and liver failure, we took out an insurance policy on him and kept it for years. Lean financial times, our growing families, and my medical school expenses made it easy to let it lapse. He died the next year and in the midst of the worst heartsickness I ever remember experiencing, we had to deal with the stress of paying for his funeral. Those were dark days—days when you wish you had a father to guide you through the fog.

The commentaries I’ve read on the prodigal son agree that the father in the story of the prodigal son was set to leave quite an inheritance to his sons. He had servants and land and animals, though how much of those things we aren’t told.

But the boys didn’t seem that interested in a relationship with their dad, as much as they wanted what his wealth and status could offer them. In fact, when the younger son asks for his inheritance while his father is alive, he is basically wishing his father dead.
In the Old Testament story for today, Eve is the same way. She grasps for something of her own, some secret wisdom or knowledge that could be gained apart from God, as if He were trying to keep something good from her. It destroyed everything and tore at the fabric of the way God made the world—a world in which He gives us all we need and we receive His gifts in thankfulness.
But we don’t do that, do we. At least I don’t.

I think I know better what I need than He does, so I strive and grasp and want and long. For a better everything. A better life, a nicer house, a richer marriage, a shinier car, a bigger bank account, more influence, and on and on until the sick cycle of my wanting becomes an addiction to everything I don’t need. This life He gave me, the one I actually live in, never seems like enough.

25085504_xl

So I set out, just like the prodigal son and just like Eve. In search of something to call my own. It probably plays out the same in your life, too. We haven’t so much broken our Father’s commandments as we’ve broken His heart.*
All He ever wanted was to give us everything.
In the Gospel lesson, as always, Jesus rescues us, reminding us that only those who are sick need a physician—those who are sick in their sin and despair, those who are sick in their pride and self-sufficiency, those for whom enough is never enough.
So we’re in good company when we find ourselves barred from Eden, in the far country of the pig pen, sifting through the broken parts of everything we’ve snatched for ourselves. Jesus came to open back the gates to heaven, to restore us to Eden, to find us wallowing in our own selfish mire and bring us back home to our Father.

And there, He will make the lame walk and the blind see. He will set about with a feast for us prodigals like you’ve never seen. He will finally gift us with our full inheritance, and we will weep to know that the *gift* he always wanted to give us was Himself.

Click Here to Download

If you know anyone who would benefit from this study of God’s love, share this post!

I will also be reading through Grace Upon Grace during Lent and discussing it once a week on Pericope. This book is AMAZING.

The One Reason We Need Lent This Year {and a Free 40 Day Devotional}

February 9, 2016 by Edie Wadsworth 27 Comments

wintercollage

I spent most of the last year writing my memoir, much of which dealt with the complicated relationship I had with my Daddy. The loss and pain of it drove me into the scriptures, looking for comfort, looking for answers, looking for fathers.

I landed on the story of the Prodigal Son, or maybe I should say it landed in me.

I spent months in that story, reading books and commentary, and in general, trying to figure out what Jesus was telling us about Himself in that story, about what kind of Father we have in God.

We need Lent because we have forgotten. We need Lent because we are lost. Our doubt about the Father’s love, our besetting sins and our own piercing self-righteousness have blinded us to what we were made to do and who we were made to do it for.

Lent is a time for remembering what kind of a Father we really have and to what lengths He will go to find us and rescue us. Lent is a time to retreat with Him, to confess to Him how utterly dependent we’ve become on everything but Him. Lent is a time to remember what it means to be truly loved, to be held up from the fray of the world’s chaos, to be carried home by our Abba Father.

Lent is about our repentance, yes. But more importantly, Lent is about His forgiveness.

We walk with Him to the cross so we will KNOW beyond a shadow of a doubt that this sacrifice was FOR US. God forgives us, not because of our growing discipline or holiness, but for the sake of Christ, alone. Want to give up sugar? Fine. Want to fast on Fridays? Perfect. Our bodies and our resources need to be brought into submission so that we can use them to serve our neighbor, not ourselves.

But remember, Lent is about Him and how He has set his face like a flint to go to Jerusalem to die for the sins of all mankind. We need Lent because we so desperately need Him.

He alone is our homecoming, standing “far off” waiting and watching everyday for His beloved to return.

In case the observance of Lent is brand new to you, this post might be helpful.

*I’ll be using the texts from the PrayNow app for the Lenten season along with the story of the Prodigal Son. I’m so thankful to have you here and pray you will be blessed by this time together.

Blessed Ash Wednesday to you.

For the free pdf of my Lenten study, click the link below!

(If you’ve already subscribed to my blog, it will tell you that you are already subscribed but then it will send you a copy of the study! If you are not yet subscribed, you will be sent a confirmation email and then once you confirm your email address, you will be sent the study. Comment below if you have trouble.)

cominghomefree

Click Here to Download

If you know anyone who would benefit from this study of God’s love, share this post!

I will also be reading through Grace Upon Grace during Lent and discussing it once a week on Pericope. This book is AMAZING.

The Cost of the Feast {Lenten Devotional Day 30}

March 25, 2015 by Edie Wadsworth Leave a Comment

Day 30 of the Lenten devotional series

Texts: Psalm 18, Ex. 4: 1-18, Mark 15: 1-15, Luke 15: 23

“Bring the fatted calf and kill it..”

When one or all of our older sons is coming home for a visit, there’s one thing you can be sure of—there will be a plethora of smoked meats prepared at our house. Stevie loves nothing more than a weekend with the kids home and his Big Green Egg grill full of ribs, brats, salmon, chicken, and any other meat you can think of. He even does the shopping for the meat smoking extravaganzas because he wants to make sure everything is just right. He makes his own tangy-vinegary-spicy barbeque sauce and he fiddles around outside with the grill FOR HOURS. It’s like man-nirvana. I don’t dare interfere except to make a few side dishes which themselves are totally irrelevant to the man cubs. There’s something about those boys coming home that inspires a feast—even for a man who couldn’t find the apple cider vinegar in our house to save his life.

When I read the Gospel lesson for today about Pilate handing over Jesus to be crucified, it all made sense. Our father has done everything to restore us to the table, where his only son will be the very food—the sacrifice and sustenance. The suffering of Jesus makes it all possible. The death of Christ is the price God paid in order to bring us home, to make merry and feast with us. And every Sunday when the Lord’s Supper is served, we partake of this life, this sacrifice. There Christ joins Himself to us in body and soul— his suffering redeeming our suffering, his life overcoming our death. The Old Testament is full of God feeding his people, of him finding a way to save them with food and same is true for us today.

Feasting is not an afterthought with God.

It is the point of his coming—to bring us back to the table and feed us with the life-giving food of the crucified Christ.

You cannot earn your spot at the table. It was paid for you by Jesus, the paschal victim and the paschal feast.*

Welcome to the table, dear one.

*From the hymn At the Lamb’s High Feast We Sing.

You Don’t Need to Change the World

March 3, 2015 by Edie Wadsworth 11 Comments

from Day 12 of my Lenten devotional email series on the prodigal son and yes, it’s never too late to join us!

table

Texts: Psalm 126, Gen. 21:1-21, Mark 6, 35-56, Luke 15: 16

“He was longing to be fed with the pods that the pigs ate, and no one gave him anything.”

When I left my job as a family doctor and became a “stay at home” mom for the first time ever, I was determined to figure out how to put dinner on the table. Mostly because EVERYBODY IS ALWAYS HUNGRY at my house. They want dinner. As in, EVERY single night. And breakfast and lunch and snacks. FORTHELOVE.

But how hard could it be, right?

MmmHmm.

REALLY hard is how hard, as all you moms can surely stand up and shout a hearty AMEN. And despite the fact that I write about feeding my family quite a bit, I still struggle with it some days. A lot of days, actually.

But slowly over months and years I became pretty proficient at feeding us. And somewhere along the way I realized that as simple as it sounds, feeding my people is part of God’s work for me. It’s a beautiful and sacred thing. It’s so ordinary and necessary and life-giving and humbling and rewarding.

But it also drives me crazy—thinking of new things to make, the constantly dirty kitchen, the millions of dishes, the sheer amount of times you have to handle the food by the time you’ve eaten it and are cleaning it up. It’s easy to dream of a bigger purpose for my life. Wasn’t I made for more than this?

I don’t know if I was or not but I do know that Jesus spent His life feeding people and caring for their most basic needs. The God of the universe thinks so much of feeding people that the night before He died, when He gave His last will and testament, he told his disciples to carry on the sacred work of feeding His sheep.

In the prodigal story, the younger son is in the far country and he’s squandered everything he received from his father’s estate. He’s so hungry that he’d take pig’s food. And no respectable Jew would ever have considered that.

But the scripture says, no one gave him anything. That verse haunted my dreams at night when I was studying the prodigal story last year. No one gave him anything. He’s outside the fold. He has wandered from the pasture, like all sheep do. Like you and I constantly do. He is in dangerous territory because he has rebelled against the one person who always made sure he had food—his father.

And there’s more feeding in Mark’s Gospel today where a crowd shows up for Jesus.

5,000 men and their families. And they’re hungry. The disciples want to send them away but Jesus simply says, “Give them something to eat.”

We are the sheep of God’s pasture and it’s not our job to change the world. It’s our job to stay in the pasture and eat. And eat and eat and eat some more. To receive His Word, to receive the Supper, to stay close to the Shepherd.

Then mostly by our fumbling, we can lead other lost sheep to the bounty of God’s table so they can eat too.

Our job is to eat and then share that good food with our neighbor, starting with the ones who live in our houses.

You don’t need to change the world.

Just make dinner.

It’s practically the same thing.

Me & My Self-Righteous Lent

February 19, 2015 by Edie Wadsworth 9 Comments

This is day 2 of my Lenten devotional on the prodigal son. I hope you find some hope and encouragement here. Click Here to Download the 40 day devotional study!

lent

lovelent

Texts: Psalm 8: 1-6, Gen. 1:20-2:3, Mark 1:14-28

Eight years ago, I observed the season of Lent for the first time. We had just joined a historic, liturgical church and I was completely fascinated by the rich history & ritual of it all, things I had seriously doubted and even mocked when I was 25 and knew everything there was to know about serious Christianity. (insert a little compassionate hug for my 25 year old self)I wanted to do Lent right. I wanted to be the best at Lent. I wanted to repent and remember and deny myself like nobody’s business. I wanted to show those Lutherans what Lent could really look like if an over-achieving (perhaps slightly self-righteous) evangelical got a hold of it. I went into Lent with all the serious spiritual contemplation I could muster, complete with a journal to jot down all my spiritual growth. And oh the spiritual growth I was anticipating. If there had been a #christiangirlinstagram hashtag back in the day, I would have worn it out. (Do yourself a favor and follow @johnbcrist on Instagram.) (#christiangirlinstagram is a parody on how we as christian girls like to document our devotion to the Lord in ever more creative ways. It’s painfully hilarious.)

walkinglent

If Lent were the equivalent of me taking a walk, I looked down at my feet the whole time, admiring my awesome cowboy boots, or my spiritual progress, as it were. So I say this very much from experience that the greatest temptation during Lent is not that you won’t be able to keep your Lenten discipline. The greatest temptation is that you will constantly take your spiritual temperature, wondering if you are in fact becoming better and better. I’ll give you the cliff notes of my first self-righteous Lent. The way you’ll know you’re making progress is that you won’t see any progress at all. What you’ll see is more sin, more selfishness, less discipline, more temptation, less patience, less love. Why? Because the more you hear the Word & meditate on it, the more sin it will expose in you, like turning spotlights on the dirty corners of your house.

If your Lenten journey is really successful, you’ll get to the end of it and wonder how you can still be so far off. And that’s exactly the point. Lent reminds us how lost we are, how self-absorbed we are, how far we are from ever being what we were created to be.

When we finally despair with our pathetic attempts to be more spiritual, when we finally put to death all our preconceived ideas about being holy and righteous, when we empty ourselves of ourselves, He will fill us with all good things. And those good things will turn us outside ourselves toward our neighbor. We will finally look up and realize that we’re not walking just to walk. We’re walking with our neighbors, who despite our weak and faltering faith, need us. And they don’t need us to be super spiritual overachievers whose Lenten journals are full of deep insights. They just need a cup of water or a maybe some soup, perhaps even someone to finally make them laugh.

In the Gospel reading for today, Jesus calls his first disciples and the text says they “immediately” went to Capernaum where Jesus healed a man possessed with an unclean spirit. They didn’t have a goal setting meeting on how to best plot their spiritual growth. They looked around and saw that the world is hurting and dying so they got right to work.

Let’s not succomb to the very real temptation to watch our own feet as we walk this road together. Look up. Look around & outward. And when we stop worrying about ourselves and our own progress and begin offering our gifts of love and healing to our neighbors, we will see the beauty of His life in us—a life meant to be poured out for others.

roseslent4

[[Get the study by clicking below. Make sure you click the link in the confirmation email ]]

Click Here to Download the lenten study!

Our Broken Hallelujah

April 18, 2014 by Edie Wadsworth 15 Comments

“Standing by the cross of Jesus was his mother…..”

1393894954_c962d4da3e_o

As a mother, it’s hard not to see Good Friday from the broken heart of the mother of God, watching with horror as her son was mocked and beaten and crucified.

The sin of Adam, which ushered in our suffering and death would be answered by Christ, the suffering Savior, whose kingdom is born in you, through the obedience and the quiet yes of a young girl from Nazareth. It must have seemed like no time to her that the linens she wrapped her baby in became his grave clothes. And just like Mary, the shroud that covered you in your dying with Him will become the swaddling clothes with which you offer your love, incarnate, to the world.

The yes cry of the mother of God would break her heart into a thousand pieces. [Read more…] about Our Broken Hallelujah