Session One Discussion Questions:

YOU CAN ANSWER ANY OF THE QUESTIONS YOU'D LIKE IN THE COMMENTS BELOW THIS POST.

1. What part of the teaching had the most impact on you?
2. Imagine for a moment that you have decided to do a random act of kindness for a stranger by leaving a $100 bill in a public place (such as a park, a lobby, or a store aisle). After placing the cash where it can be easily spotted, you hide nearby to see who will find it. As you wait, you begin to think about who might receive your gift. • What kind of person do you most hope will and will not find your gift? For instance, you might hope a struggling single parent will find it, and that a compulsive gambler will not find it. Identify three or four kinds of people you would consider deserving recipients and three or four you would consider less than deserving. • If someone in the less-than-deserving category were to find your gift, what thoughts might you zing his or her way.  For example, You don’t deserve it. You’d better not waste it. Someone else needs it more. • The same way we think about giving gifts is often reflected in the way we think about receiving them. Consider the internal response you tend to have when you are the recipient of a gift, whether material or immaterial. What might the thought zingers you just identified suggest about your own ability to receive a gift, perhaps especially when it is unexpected? Do you send similar thought zingers to yourself? (I don’t deserve it; I better not waste it; someone else needs it more.) What other internal dynamics sometimes make it difficult for you to truly receive a gift?
3. How would you describe your understanding and experience of Lent over the years? Read this description of Lent: Today, Lent marks the forty-day period before Easter that begins each year on Ash Wednesday. Although it is traditionally a time devoted to self-examination, self-denial, and repentance, Lent sinks its deepest roots into the joyful expectation of new life through God’s forgiveness and steadfast love. This sense of Lent is evident in the words of John the Baptist: “The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!” (Mark 1:15). We also find it in this passage written by the prophet Joel, traditionally read at the beginning of Lent: “Even now,” declares the Lord, “return to me with all your heart, with fasting and weeping and mourning.” Rend your heart and not your garments. Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love, and he relents from sending calamity (Joel 2:12–13). The time during which Joel was a prophet was one of great prosperity. God had richly blessed his people, but their hearts had grown cold over time. They began to take “God and his blessings for granted. [Their] faith had degenerated into an empty formalism and their lives into moral decadence.”1 Through the prophet, God pleaded with his people to return to him with their whole heart. The season of Lent issues a similar call to God’s people today. It is a time to take seriously the areas of our lives in which we fall short, feel defeated, or have grown cold. And we do so not to beat ourselves up but to prepare for God’s gifts: Lent is a time for discipline, for confession, for honesty, not because God is mean or fault-finding or fingerpointing but because he wants us to know the joy of being cleaned out, ready for all the good things he now has in store. This process of being cleaned out is part of how we return to God with all our heart, which is what Lent is meant to help us do.
   
4. What, if anything, shifts in your perspective when you think of Lent less as a season of guilt or giving something up and more as a time to be intentional about preparing to receive joy and good things from God?
5. The Hebrew verbs translated rend and return in Joel 2:12–13 are images of repentance in action. People would rend or tear their garments as an expression of intense grief or in response to a catastrophe. To return means to make a U- turn, to go back to the point of departure, to change one’s mind. What do these two words—rend and return—suggest about what it means not only to seek reconciliation with God but also to do so with all your heart? YOU CAN ANSWER ANY OF THE QUESTIONS YOU'D LIKE IN THE COMMENTS BELOW.