Lent 2026 Guide-DIGITAL - Flipbook - Page 11
Week 3
Thursday, March 5 – Wednesday, March 11
Devotion 1
Inspiration
We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.
– The Nicene Creed (325)
Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of
diseas’d corpses,
It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them
at last. – Walt Whitman, “This Compost” (1856)
The more time I spend at the compost pile, the more I wonder whether one
thing we might need is a robust theology of compost … Isn’t the story of
compost really just the story of God? Turning fear to courage, sorrow to joy,
death to life … A robust theology of the compost reminds us that death and
the things of death, our sin, our suffering, the ways we hurt one another, the
ways we harm ourselves: These things are never the end of God’s story.
– Jeff Chu, Good Soil: The Education of an Accidental Farmhand (2025)
Reflection
We begin Lent by recalling that we come from, and will return to, ashes
and dust. And while our death is inevitable, the story of Easter tells us
that death is not an end but a metamorphosis. For me, there is no more
powerful demonstration of this miraculous transformation than a compost
pile, where worms, insects, and microbes break down eggshells, coffee
grounds, rotten fruit and veg, scraps of paper and leaves into nutrient-rich
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