Have a Beautiful, Terrible Lent.
Dear Church,
Our pastors, Dr. Libby Grammer & Dr. Mike Hatfield, are excited to invite you to join us to reflect on Have a Beautiful, Terrible Day! during this season of Lent. This is a study offered by Kate Bowler and her team at Everything Happens and is an honest and real reflection on what it means to follow Jesus through the ups and downs of our days. It also allows for discussion about life as it really is—not just the Instagram-worthy parts but the difficult and the painful too. We hope you will join us.
“Kate Bowler is a 4x New York Times bestselling author, award-winning podcast host, and professor at Duke Divinity. She studies the cultural stories we tell ourselves about success, suffering, and whether (or not) we’re capable of change. She wrote the first and only history of the American prosperity gospel—the belief that God wants to give you health, wealth, and happiness—before being unexpectedly diagnosed with stage IV cancer at age 35. While she was in treatment and not expected to survive, she wrote two New York Times bestselling memoirs, Everything Happens for a Reason (and Other Lies I’ve Loved) and No Cure For Being Human (and Other Truths I Need to Hear). After years of being told she was incurable, she was declared cancer-free. But she was forever changed by what she discovered: life is so beautiful and life is so hard. For everyone.”
Feel free to order Kate’s new book (https://katebowler.com/books/have-a-beautiful-terrible-day/) and sign up for the daily Lent prompts (https://katebowler.com/seasonal_devotional/have-abeautiful-terrible-lent/#daily-email). Once you get the book, we encourage you to start by reading Kate’s introduction to Lent on pages 96 and 97. Then, if you sign up, you will start to receive the daily devotionals beginning on Ash Wednesday, February 14, 2024, which can be informative to our group discussions. (Neither is required to join in on the study, but they’ll offer depth to the study).
Our first gathering, with members and friends of both First Baptist Church and Chatham Heights Baptist Church will be on Tuesday, February 20, 2024 at 12:00 Noon on Zoom (look for a link in your e-newsletter or request a link from the church office!
Holding each of you close to our hearts and in our prayers as we begin this journey together.
Libby & Mike