Holy Week Devotional Introduction

This week-long devotional is not about reading. It’s about practice. Pushing past just an intellectual engagement is not an easy exercise in the modern west. It takes intentionality. 
Over the course of the next week, you will receive a series of emails each morning that will hopefully serve as a daily guide to prayerfully encounter Jesus in the Scriptures. The most important story is not the one you are living. It’s the life that Jesus lived. The death He died. The day He conquered death and ascended to the right hand. The most important story is His Story. This devotional is an attempt to deep-dive into his life as we look forward to Easter. It may also be a foreign experience for some of you. We don’t have good categories for how to engage our whole selves in prayer and active, humble listening before the Lord in the Word. But we are embodied souls. And Jesus’ redemption is moving into every fabric of our being. 

What might be different for you is the practice of breath prayer. This is an exercise in prayer that the church has used since the early centuries that followed the apostles. This is basically just sitting before the Lord, quieting your mind, focusing on His glory by breathing in and out, naturally repeating prayers from scripture as a way to cultivate a continuous awareness of God’s presence. These devotionals start with breath prayer as a way to ask God to speak through his Word to us. Then, in the moments to follow, after we have quieted ourselves through prayer, we will turn to God’s Word and hear a few details of what happened that week as Jesus drew near to the Cross. Then, after much reflection, there will be a prayer that you can pray as a way to conclude your time. 

We hope this impacts you in ways that are unexpected.