Psalms of our People - Holy Week 2021.
In April as we prepared for yet another Easter week in lockdown, unable to be with one another face-to-face, our community wanted to lean into Holy Week in a way that acknowledged the difficulty of the times we were in and the loss of not being together, yet remained authentic in how we celebrated the hope and victory won for us through Jesus’ death, battle and resurrection.
The lament of Good Friday, and the unanswered mystery found in the contemplation of Holy Saturday became really pivotal for us in our spiritual journey, as we moved towards remembering and celebrating all that Jesus did for us on those fateful days, and responding with praise and thankfulness for His great sacrifice.
It felt like there were parallels between how the original followers of Jesus felt on Good Friday (and especially Holy Saturday), to the lockdown stuck-behind-closed-doors season we have been in for the past 14 months. It really gave us fresh insight into the depths of Jesus’s willingness to give it all for us, and for all of humanity, and brought a new perspective into just how much he sacrificed for us.
As a way of offering ourselves in raw, real worship to the Lord our whole community gave time to contemplative prayer on Good Friday & Holy Saturday, then spending time by responding to the Lord through writing our own Psalms to God. (Did you know that God’s people were encouraged to write their own psalms on a daily basis? This discovery has been hugely innovative for releasing a fresh wave of creativity in how we worship the Lord for our community - that’s a blog post for another time!)
Below are a collection of Psalms written by some of the people of The Gathering - we pray that they bless you, and draw you close to Jesus, just as they have done for all of us.
