As we walk through the Christian year together, each season will be accompanied by a guiding question – a question to wrestle with, pray through, and bring to God. During the season of Lent, as we give our attention towards the cross, we’re asking together: “How are we being drawn into repentance?”

Psalm 32 brings attention to the cost of our isolation – from God, from those around us, and from ourselves. What are some of the places into which you isolate? What are your coping mechanisms when you feel the weight of the world on you?

David moves from hiding from God to calling God a “hiding place.” What might it mean to have God as a hiding place in our places of brokenness?

“Lent demands both the healing of the soul and the honing of the soul, both penance and faith, both a purging of what is superfluous in our lives and the heightening, the intensifying, of what is meaningful.”
Joan Chittister

Blessed is the one whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered. Blessed is the one whose sin the Lord does not count against them and in whose spirit is no deceit.
Psalm 32:1-2 NIV

“The subtle serpent taps into our deepest anxiety as humans: the fear that what I have, no matter how good it may be, is not enough. The haunting suspicion that someone else has it better than me. That someone else is better than me. So, not only do I not have enough, I am not enough. I am less than.”

Sean Gladding, The Story Of God, The Story Of Us

While I kept silent, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.
Psalm 32:3-4 NIV

…a slow habituation to a withered state where it feels like life itself is being drained from us. The stresses of life compound, sending us into a self-protective mode, our body’s energies shifting from life-giving connection to life-preserving survival. In time, this withered state we’re living in may become our new normal.
Chuck Degroat, Healing What’s Within

Then I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not hide my iniquity; I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,” and you forgave the guilt of my sin.
Psalm 32:5 NIV

“Repentance is agreeing with God about reality.”
Ben Sternke

Most holy and merciful Father: We confess to you and to one another, and to the whole communion of saints in heaven and on earth, that we have sinned by our own fault in thought, word, and deed; by what we have done, and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart, and mind, and strength. We have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We have not forgiven others, as we have been forgiven. Have mercy on us, Lord.
Book Of Common Prayer

Therefore let all who are faithful offer prayer to you; at a time of distress, the rush of mighty waters shall not reach them. You are a hiding place for me; you preserve me from trouble; you surround me with glad cries of deliverance.
Psalm 32:6-7 NIV

“Where are you?”

Will you allow yourself to be found?

God’s image in you and me speaks to our inherent worth, intimate belonging, and profound purpose. It’s because God sees us whole and not as a hopeless collection of disordered parts that we can be re-membered, restored, reconnected to Love. It’s because God’s memory of us runs deeper than our own that we can find our way back Home, that we can be found, each of us a hungry and heartsick prodigal. It’s because God goes after us—even when we’re turned inside out—that we can experience freedom and flourishing.
Chuck Degroat, Healing What’s Within