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Beginning to Flourish - Week Six

Administrator February 16, 2025 0 0

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Longing and everlasting love — a well watered garden

 

This week we are travelling through the vivid picture of return and renewal drawn in Jeremiah 31: 1-14 with its well watered garden. Deep in the human heart is a longing that’s almost impossible to answer, almost impossible to fulfil. In God and through God we find something big enough and wide enough to answer — everlasting love. It is this love that will sustain Jesus through Holy Week, the cross, and the tomb, to resurrection!

SEEDS TO SOW: As a gardener works to create a system of mutually supporting life growing together — how can we support a myriad of environmental organisations working to heal our world for all to thrive?

 

Read Jeremiah 31: 1-6

Rest, rebuilding, and replanting.

We have drawn several words beginning with R throughout this beautifully compelling reading, the first three are rest, rebuilding and replanting.

Q: What is the relationship between rest, rebuilding and replanting? Both in this passage and in our everyday lives?

 

Read Jeremiah 31: 7-14

Returning, restoration and redeeming.

Q: Our next three are returning, restoration and redeeming. What is the relationship between returning, restoration and redeeming? Both in this passage and in our everyday lives?

 

Read John 12: 1-8

Surprising gift.

Now we hurtle from the Old Testament forward to the first century and this incredible scene. 

Q: How do we read it in the context of Jeremiah 31? 

In Holy Week Jesus is about go into another wilderness, everything is going to be stripped away from him as love is stripped bare — belonging, shelter, water and finally his breath — but the one thing that isn’t taken away from him his everlasting love

Q: Where do we see the same themes of rest, rebuilding, replanting, returning, restoring and redemption in this reading?

Q: How would the scent of the perfume have lingered with Jesus through the week ahead?

 

Lent Transformations Week 6

The Transforming Garden

Take some time every day this week to appreciate living things in the natural world. 

Then after doing so think of one thing you can do to tend for our beautiful world.