Sunday: First Week in Lent Year B

Lent for Everyone
Mark Year B
WEEK 1: SUNDAY...


...I met a friend the other day who is working on the great Victorian missionary and explorer David Livingstone (1813 –73). Livingstone was a great hero to nineteenth-century Christians: he combined evangelistic zeal with a restless hunger for both
geographical and scientific exploration, and – long before people became cynical about such things – he genuinely believed that he was bringing ‘civilization’ to the vast and hitherto unmapped interior of Africa. ‘I am prepared to go anywhere,’ he said, ‘provided it be forward.’ We today might want to point out the folly of blundering on into the unknown, and of doing things that might have, to say the least, more ambiguous results than he intended. But there is no doubting his sheer courage and energy, which puts most of us (whose efforts are no doubt equally ambiguous, though on a more domestic scale) to shame.

But I was put in mind of such visionary exploration when praying through this Psalm; because it is the prayer of someone who has heard God’s call to set off and go somewhere but is, as yet, quite uncertain where that ‘somewhere’ is. This, to be sure, has been a common experience of God’s people down the ages...

Taken from Lent for Everyone Mark Year B by Tom Wright