2025 Lenten Daily Devotional!

 

We encourage all SCC members and friends to download this free 2025 Lenten devotional by Kate Bowler entitled “The Hardest Part”

Click on the link below and follow the instructions to download either the digital or print version of the “Daily Guide”. You can also sign up to receive a daily email devotion. 

 

https://katebowler.com/seasonal_devotional/the-hardest-part/#gf_54

 

Life is this strange, tender mix, isn’t it? Joy and sorrow. Love and loss. Big wins and even bigger failures. We cling tightly to the beautiful moments, but then the phone rings, a diagnosis drops, or some creeping ache reminds us that everything—everything—is so much more fragile than we’d like to admit. Life can be too much. And Lent is the season where we sit in that heaviness. For 40 days, we stop pretending things will suddenly get better and face the truth: life

is fragile, and so are we.

 

Lent begins with Ash Wednesday when we hear the words no one really wants to say out loud: you are dust, and to dust you shall return. It’s not exactly the kind of thing you’d embroider on a pillow, but it’s a truth we need. Lent invites us to stop pretending we can hold it all together and instead sit with the weight of what we carry—the grief, the regrets, the messes we can’t untangle, no matter how much we try.

 

Here’s the hardest part: to be human is to carry the weight of our own mortality. We love the joy and triumph of Easter morning, but first, we have to sit with Good Friday, when God is on the losing team. Jesus, who we look to for hope and healing, suffers and dies. His pain is real, just like ours. We can’t rush past it. We can’t skip to the good part, because it’s through the deepest hurt that we begin to understand what it means to be fully human, fully broken.

 

In The Hardest Part: Hurt We Carry, Hope We Find, we’ll walk through these paradoxes together. Each day, we’ll look at the hardest parts of being human—heartbreak, emptiness, shame, and longing—and acknowledge the weight of it. You’ll find Scripture, a reflection, a response prompt, and a blessing to remind you that grace has a way of sneaking in, even when life feels impossible (kind of like finding your phone after you’ve torn the house apart for the fifth time).

 

So, let’s do this hard part together. Let’s sit with the ache and the fragile parts we’d rather avoid, and trust that hope is somewhere nearby, waiting for us to notice. Because when we stay with the hard part, something else happens: the good part begins to unfold, slowly but surely.