Happy new year! I’m glad to share this prayer for 2024 by George Dawson from the 1800s – still applicable today.
You might also want to consider three simple prayer practices you might want to add in the new year to strengthen your relationship with God. Read the blog hosted at God Hears Her here.
I pray you will have a peaceful and joyous start to the new year as you cling to the loving presence of God.
I received a question about Lent resources last week:
I am hoping to have a women’s Lent group and wondered if you could recommend a book to follow?
My answer:
I wonder if your women’s group would like my little resource The Prayers of Jesus? It explores 6 of Jesus’ 7 prayers from the gospels, which is fab for Lent because as you know they culminate in Gethsemane and on the cross. I did a video series for it with introductions, a prayer exercise and a conversation with the very interesting Micha Jazz. There are meeting-starter ideas, the session content, discussion questions, and ideas for leading a prayer exercise. Perhaps this could be adaptable for your group? No worries if not. With the cost-of-living shooting upwards, the latest print run got expensive for a little paperback – £7.99, discounted.
For a Lent book if your group is happy to read a bit more, I love Walter Wangerin’s Reliving the Passion. (My review from years ago in Woman Alive is here.) Or my daily readings of The Living Cross, a through-the-Bible look at forgiveness.
Need ideas for how to have a good Lent? Here’s an article I wrote a few years ago.
Happy new year! The prayer of examen is simply looking back to move forward with God. You might want to take some time this month to consider a few questions as we launch into the new year. I found these somewhere last year and engaged with them – I’m sorry that I didn’t note where that was!
Three questions to consider:
1. What have the storms of 2022 picked up and blown away for you?
2. How has 2022 anchored you more firmly?
3. What fresh roots have you discovered in the noise of this past season?
Happy Thanksgiving!
I love the American holiday of Thanksgiving—a time set apart for family, friends, feasting, and turning our hearts toward gratitude. Living in the UK, we’ll host our gathering on Saturday, but we’re grateful to be able to go to the service at St. Paul’s Cathedral this morning to sing our praises to God and give him thanks in that glorious setting. How amazing to have this opportunity on a day that’s otherwise just a normal day in Britain.
I recently moaned in my newsletter how Black Friday is such a thing that we’ve imported here while not bringing in the wonderful holiday of Thanksgiving. Lots of my lovely community reminded me what I did know but had overlooked in the early-morning drafting of that missive—American Thanksgiving was modeled on the festival of Harvest. This holiday has been very important especially in rural communities, where farmers and people of all kinds come together in church to present their offerings of grain, fruit and other produce as a way to say thanks to God. You can read more about the origins of Thanksgiving in my first book, Finding Myself in Britain—an excerpt is here.
Wherever we are in the world, we can stop and give thanks. I suggested some ways to do so in my newsletter:
I pray you will find much to give thanks for!
[Art by Leo Boucher. Used with permission; all rights reserved.]
Happy Mother’s Day – that is, if you celebrate today and if it’s a day to celebrate for you. I know for many, it can feel painful, whether you had or have a tough relationship with your mother, or if you wanted to be a mother and haven’t been, of if your family forgets that it’s Mother’s Day and your child sees you cry for the first time as you make her waffles.
I want to honor my lovely mom, who serves and gives so much to our family. Above is a photo with us and my dad during my recent visit.
I thought I’d also share my first published article in Woman Alive (from 1999), which I found this week when I learned that Woman Alive is turning 40! It features what’s today known as a “tradwife” – women parenting their children full-time. Not sure I like that term; the title, “domestic artistry,” is better.
I love the line that closes the article: “It’s hard to be bored when you’re with someone you love.”
Happy Easter!
We’ve entered the season of the church year of celebration and feasting – forty days of remembering with joy that Christ is risen and is among us. If we’ve observed Lent, the forty days of fasting before Easter, then we surely should mark this time of feasting afterwards.
Augustine of Hippo, the eminent theologian, spoke in a sermon about this time of celebration – a time of saying “alleluia.” (Especially as during Lent, we don’t say this word; in fact, some people symbolically bury the word during Lent and then dramatically bring it out on Easter morning.) Here’s the quotation from sermon 255:
Since it was the Lord’s will that I visit your graces in alleluia time, I owe you a word or two on alleluia. I trust I won’t bore you if I remind you of what you already know; because, after all, we not only say this alleluia every day, we also take pleasure in it every day. You know, of course, that alleluia means, in English, “Praise God”; and by singing this word together, our voices in harmony and our hearts in agreement, we are urging each other on to praise God. The only people who can praise him without a qualm are those who have nothing about him that might displease him.
And indeed, during this time of our exile and our wandering, we say alleluia to cheer us on our way. At present alleluia is for us a traveler’s song; but by a toilsome road we are wending our way to home and rest where, all our busy activities over and done with, the only thing that will remain will be alleluia.
![A watercolor rendition of Jesus carrying his cross with 2 soldiers helping him, with splotches of red and blue surrounding the three figures.]](https://amyboucherpye.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/JesusPicksUpHisCross-2.jpg)
Many Christians view today as the most wonderful and most awful day—the day we remember the Man who was God who died on the cross that we might live free.
I invite you to spend a few moments pondering and praying, sharing with God your feelings about how his Son came to earth as a baby, lived and healed and loved, and then carried his cross and there was nailed where he breathed his last. Where he welcomed one next to him to life eternal. Where he uttered his last words in a life-giving prayer.
2 He grew up before him like a tender shoot,
and like a root out of dry ground.
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
3 He was despised and rejected by mankind,
a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
Like one from whom people hide their faces
he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.4 Surely he took up our pain
and bore our suffering,
yet we considered him punished by God,
stricken by him, and afflicted.
5 But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him,
and by his wounds we are healed.
Isaiah 53:2–5 (NIV)
Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good.
His love endures forever.
Give thanks to the God of gods.
His love endures forever.
Give thanks to the Lord of lords:
His love endures forever. (Psalm 136:1–3)
God has given us so much; my heart overflows with thanks. I pray you will have a spring of gratitude welling up within you, wherever in the world you are today. May the Lord bless you and keep you.
[Art by Leo Boucher. Used with permission; all rights reserved.]
Merry Christmas!
We celebrate the Light coming into the darkness – Jesus, the Son of God who came to live with us. He who brings peace and love amid fears and anxiety.
May the true hope of Christmas fill you during these very different times.
We celebrated Mother’s Day yesterday, and although I was supposed to be in Minnesota with my mom, the lockdown meant I got to celebrate with my family here in London. I was sad that my parents didn’t get to see any of their family on this day as they observe sheltering rules, but we had some good conversations over the weekend.
My mom is a woman of prayer, a ministry that she’s long had, along with her practical, hands-on service, but one that has especially flourished in recent years. Daily she prays for her family and others, and when I consider the potential effects of these prayers, I often think of the well-known saying by Alfred, Lord Tennyson: “More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of.”
Some will be breathing a sigh of relief now that the UK and US Mother’s Days are behind us, for they can feel painful for a variety of reasons. I like the social-media post of a friend that says, “I may not be a mother, yet I have mothered many students in my years of teaching.” She plays an important role in their lives, and her love that she pours out on them indeed embodies the grace of mothering.
May you know the love of God who said to his people: “As a mother comforts her child, so will I comfort you…” (Isaiah 66:13, NIV).