Let go and be open

Lent is a season of invitation. It calls us to loosen our grip on what holds us back – habits, assumptions, fears – and to open ourselves to the transforming presence of God. Each week in worship, we explore a different mindset shift: letting go of something that limits us, and becoming open to something that brings life. This journey is not linear or easy. It echoes the experience of the disciples who again and again had to let go of what was familiar in order to follow Jesus more deeply.

As the Revd Dr Roger Walton writes:

“And in this relationship they [the disciples] kept having to return to that very f irst experience of leaving things behind. Mark tells that Simon and Andrew ‘left everything’ to follow. But this was only the beginning. The symbolic leaving behind of boats and nets is met again and again in their experience of travelling with Jesus. They have to leave places where they have been popular (Mark 6:45) or had divine illumination (9:8), and exchange territories of relative safety for places of danger (10:32). Most of all they have to let go of established ideas that have formed their world view up to this point: that the wealthy were blessed by God; that greatness lies in power over others; that men rather than women and children were the ones to show the way to God; that victory would never involve humiliation and suffering. All these notions would be challenged along the way, and the disciples would be invited over and over again to let go and follow.”

Roger Walton, Disciples Together: Discipleship, Formation and Small Groups (SCM Press, London, 2014), p. 14.