Lenten Meditations from Our Parish Family
Beginning on Ash Wednesday, we invite you to journey through Lent with daily meditations written by fellow St. John’s parishioners. These reflections offer honest, thoughtful voices from within our own community—meeting us right where we are in this season of prayer, repentance, and hope. Meditations will be shared by email, posted on Facebook, and available as printed weekly copies at the church. Be on the lookout, and let these shared words accompany you as we walk the Lenten road together.
Ash Wednesday
February 18, 2026
Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21
For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
(Matthew 6:21)
There is a very special lady at St. John’s who has a gift. Her gift is writing thank-you notes.
The notes are not for large or impressive things. They are for small ones: a task completed, a kindness offered, something that could easily have gone unnoticed. They are brief and handwritten. They arrive quietly in the mail, often when you are not expecting them.
And still, they matter.
I save every one of them. They are tucked in the pages of my prayer book. They are not written for recognition. No one else needs to know they were sent. What matters—what is important—is the light they come from. They exist almost entirely in shadow, between the sender and the receiver.
As we begin this season of Lent, Jesus warns us about living in the wrong kind of light—the harsh light where even good things become performances. He invites us instead into a gentler
light, one that doesn’t demand attention.
The writer of these notes does not make a show of gratitude. She does not seek a response. And yet, she endures in these notes. I remember them. I return to them. They have shaped me more
than many public words ever have.
Lent has a way of stripping things down. It asks us what remains when we let go of being seen, when we practice faith without an audience.
Jesus tells us that where our treasure is, our heart will be also. These thank-you notes are not valuable because they are impressive. They are valuable because they are true. They are evidence of a life attentive to goodness and gratitude even when no one is watching.
This is what faith looks like when it is formed in shadow and offered in love. It is not loud. It does not announce itself. But it stays with us.
The promise of this passage—especially on this day—is that what is done in secret, in the right light, is not lost. It is seen. It is held. And sometimes, it is saved—folded carefully and kept in
the pages of a prayer book.
This Lent, the question lingers: What kind of light am I choosing to live under?
Kat Dailey