In a very few days, I will have the chance to travel to Lexington, KY with Patrick and Susan Litchfield for the 2008 Indiana-Kentucky Synod Assembly.  For three days we will be gathered with hundreds of our brothers and sisters from around the synod, gathered around worship and prayer and bible study, gathered around the Word and our common conviction of shared ministries – that God can do more for ministry with our gathered resources than we can accomplish on our own.

What an interesting time of year this has been.  If you like politics, it has been a continual smorgasbord of news, details, policy statements, and debates to slake your thirst.  If you don’t like following politics, there is a continual barrage of gossip and slander to feel irate about.  There is something this season for everyone!

I know I’m not the only one who found it impossible to talk around the lump in my throat during that extraordinary moment in our Maundy Thursday service.  Seeing the Gospel embodied like that – that is a moment that sticks with a person.  Several who were present have asked if it was planned, so let me categorically state – no, it was as much of a surprise to us “up front” as it was to you.

I don’t know if this happens to everyone or if it’s just a weirdness about me, but there are certain ideas that squirm their way into the back of my mind, and I find myself pondering them and wrestling with them for days, weeks, even months at a time.  Sometimes they’re images, sometimes they’re phrases, sometimes they’re challenges, sometimes they’re just trivial little nothings that root themselves into my brain matter and I can’t seem to get rid of them.  This Lenten season, as we’re approaching Easter, there are two that seem to have taken root.

In my reading this week, I came across a phrase and concept I had not heard before: “thin places.”  It is an idea that comes to us from the Celts, the ancient peoples of Britain and Ireland.  They used this term for those places and times when it seems like the veneer of reality is a little thinner, where heaven is a little closer.  They called these “thin places” – places and times where heaven, where the holy, where the sacred is a little closer to our every-day world.

It’s about this time of year the phenomenon of “resolutions” begins.  With the turning of the year, replacing the wall calendar, learning once again how to write a different ending on the date on our checks, we come to a point in time, one of those universally-recognized bends in time.