Senses & Lent: A Touchy Subject

This week we're looking at touch. We're racing through Lent and have somehow already reached week 4 of using our senses to help us focus our minds and hearts on Jesus this Lent!!! One more sense to go after this and then the grand finale of Holy Week!

Included is:

✋🏽 a worship song you might want to pop on

✋🏽 a Bible verse

✋🏽 a short thought to help us seek Jesus through our sense of touch

✋🏽 an activity (with some free digital papers to print)

...all designed to draw us into a closer walk with Jesus this Lent.

(In case the concept of the 5 senses is ringing a bell - yes, it was the theme for the 2022 Creative Christianity Summit! Everything you need through Lent is going to be here on the blog, don’t panic.

However if you paid for the 2022 Creative Christianity Summit, can we encourage you to dip back into it? Even if you don’t have time to listen to all the sessions, it’s worth popping on the worship sessions with Lou & Nathan Fellingham.)

This song fits well with today's Bible reading as well. It's Heal Us (feat. Blessing Offor) by Indelible Grace

(Here's a link to a Youtube video but you should be able to find it wherever you usually stream music from.)

Touch is perhaps the one sense that feels very hard to grapple with in our faith. How many times have I wished that Jesus was still physically here and I could reach out to Him. I envy Mary who could hug Him growing up, those healed by Him who felt His touch on their head, face, or shoulder and knew they were well.

For some, human touch is a painful and traumatic experience. For others, some of our most reassuring memories are bound up in the comfort of touch.

Believe it or not, the Bible is full of sensory experiences that do include touch. It is perhaps a more Western church experience that has us struggling to find a place for touch in our worship of God. Covid has scared us all even more.

Song of Solomon is full of a yearning for physical affection. A sign of remorse and grief in the Bible is ripping your clothes and putting on rough and coarse sackcloth. We think of music as a mostly audible experience but for a musician, and there are many in Scripture, there is the physical pride and joy of plucking strings or blowing a horn or hitting a tambourine. Moses and Joshua are both commanded to take off their sandals to physically stand on and touch holy ground.

Perhaps baptism is one of the few truly physical acts of worship we experience. Stepping into the water and the shock of feeling it washing entirely over us, the cooler air hitting us as we resurface.

The story of the lady - we never even find out her name - who braved the crowds to touch the hem of His robe has given comfort to many. She came in her weakness and loss and knew the only way she would be made whole was to reach out and touch Jesus.

We cannot physically touch the hem of Jesus’ robe but we do need to remember to come in our weakness and loss and know that the only way we can be made well is through Him. The robe was never the power-giving part of that story - it was Christ. What can you incorporate into your daily life that you will touch and be reminded of your absolute need for Christ?

We’d encourage you, as you fold the paper and build the dove, to dwell on your need for Christ. Are there parts of your life where you feel your weakness and desperate need of Christ? As you physically fold the paper and keep your fingers busy, pray for His power to flow into those situations.

Then place your dove (or doves if you want to make multiple!) somewhere you can touch it. The dove holds absolutely no spiritual power. It’s a piece of folded paper. But it can be a powerful reminder, through touch, that we must keep always reaching out to Jesus in our weakness because He is the only one who can heal.

Download and print out one (or all!) of the papers >> PDF A Creative Lent Digital Paper Pack OR you can use your own origami/square paper.

Here are two tutorials you can follow (slightly different from each other). They even come with video tutorials in case some of the steps stump you like they did us!

Instructables Peace Dove

Origami Guide Dove

(Please be aware these links are not on Cheerfully Given and we do not guarantee, approve, or endorse the information or products available on these sites.)