Why

Why follow the Church calendar for a year?


For two reasons.
1) As a learning project for my own spiritual journey. I grew up in the Lutheran Church, which is very calendar-oriented, but as I grew older and attended more modern evangelistic churches, the annual recognition of things such as Pentecost and Annunciation was not part of the weekly service. I want to go back and re-learn about these events that are so important to the Christian faith, meditate on them, and work them into my daily life. For a year. At which point I will re-evaluate and decide which traditions we want to continue, what things we'd like to add or do away with.

2) As a framework for orienting our family-of-three life towards God. We're newly parents, with a little girl, and a promise to God to raise her in the faith. We're also very, very slowly settling into our new home in a new town. So this combination of new family, new home and new location present a great opportunity to learn new to us but actually incredibly old Christian practices and think about implementing new traditions in our family.

On a related note, as a stay-at-home-mum/Type A overachiever, it's important to me to set goals and feel like I accomplish something every day (or I go crazy). So the idea of daily thinking about and putting into practice something that will (hopefully) teach me something, strengthen my faith, and shape our family for the better sounds good to me!

So, dear readers, you hold me accountable.
To a year, beginning this past Sunday with the commencement of Advent.
Of paying attention to the annual rhythm of the Church Calendar.
Of meditating on the role of God's promise and plan-carried-out in our daily yearly lives.
Of building family traditions.
Of exploring and learning, questioning and believing.
And most of all,
Of carving out time for God, not just on Sunday mornings or prayer-before-meals, but in the minutiae of daily life. To build our every activity upon the wonderful mystical story of our Saviour Jesus Christ.

Let it begin.