Week 1, Day 2
Begin with 2 minutes of silence
Scripture: Genesis 9:8-17
8 Then God said to Noah and his sons, 9 “I am making a covenant with you and your descendants,
10 and with the animals you brought with you — all these birds and livestock and wild animals. 11 I solemnly promise never to send another flood to kill all living creatures and destroy the earth.” 12 And God said, “I am giving you a sign as evidence of my eternal covenant with you and all living creatures. 13 I have placed my rainbow in the clouds. It is a sign of my permanent promise to you and to all the earth. 14 When I send clouds over the earth, the rainbow will be seen in the clouds,
15 and I will remember my covenant with you and with everything that lives. Never again will there be a flood that will destroy all life. 16 When I see the rainbow in the clouds, I will remember the eternal covenant between God and every living creature on earth.” 17 Then God said to Noah, “ Yes this is the sign of my covenant with all the living creatures of the earth.”
Devotional : Rainbows in the Wilderness
By Sara Merrick
I often marvel at the ways in which the life and experiences of Christ are echoed all throughout time, at the relevance and relatability of God in human form completing a mission that only He could complete, but in a way that all people of all times can access personally. I think this is easy to see in practices like Lent: a time where we, as the people of God, choose to model our ceaseless searching for Christ’s likeness on a particular experience of Christ. We enter into a self-made “wilderness,” choosing to turn away from those spaces in our lives that detract from our search for deeper relationship with God, in favor of seeking Him with a focus that may have been lost.
In Genesis 9 we see God responding to Noah’s, and his family’s, choice to follow Him into the “wilderness” with a promise that echos throughout time: a rainbow as a reminder for all living things. Noah’s entire life was changed by responding to God’s (I’m sure crazy-sounding) invitation into a wilderness unlike any other. This Lenten season we are also invited to create space for God where we have allowed other pieces of our lives to consume us. We are invited to spend time looking for God’s promises, the rainbows he is setting amongst the clouds, to create a “wilderness” — not a desolate space of isolation without community, but a purposeful space of stillness where we have the opportunity to hear the promises of God for our own lives. For it was in the stillness of the water-coated earth, that wilderness, that Noah was able to hear from God anew.
Question to Consider:
What is one step you can take today that creates a purposeful stillness, a “wilderness”, in order to prioritize seeking God over the habits and routines of your daily life?
Prayer
Lord, I praise you for your faithfulness! I cling to your promises and, like Noah and Jesus, choose to create a place of stillness in order to remove what is holding me back from knowing more of you. I ask for honesty and grace with myself as I begin to create my wilderness. Amen.
Close with two minutes of silence