World Day of Prayer scheduled at Norton Church March 7

COLFAX — Each year, one of the churches in the Colfax area hosts the World Day of Prayer event the first week in March.

This year’s location for World Day of Prayer is Norton Lutheran Church on Saturday, March 7, at 1:30 p.m.

World Day of Prayer is typically the first Friday in March, but WDP 2015 coordinator Connie Galep of Norton Church says that event organizers do have the option of choosing a different day.

Many people work, and it is difficult for them to attend World Day of Prayer on a Friday, Galep said.

To encourage and allow as many people as possible to attend, Norton Church decided to change the day for World Day of Prayer to Saturday, March 7, she said.

This year, the women of the World Day of Prayer Committee of the Bahamas calls us to consider Jesus’s words to the disciples after washing their feet: “Do you understand what I have done for you?”

The women of the Bahamas describe what Jesus does when he washes the disciples’ feet as “radical love.” To them radical love comes from humility, compassion and commitment. God’s radical love is not static or self-centered; it reaches out and draws others in.

The people of the Bahamas invite the world “to come and be washed in God’s ever-flowing ocean of grace: to bask in the iridescent light of Christ’s love, and to be embraced by God’s Holy Spirit with the cooling trade-winds of transformation.”

We can see that transformation, for example, when a teen mother does not feel alone as she finds support to continue her education and to raise her child or when a breast cancer survivor or people living with HIV and AIDS find strength to live out their journey.

During this year’s World Day of Prayer, the women of the Bahamas give us an invitation to beauty and love in the name of transformative radical love that Jesus brings to us all.

Norton Lutheran Church is located six miles west of Colfax on state Highway 170.

For more information about World Day of Prayer on Saturday, March 7, at 1:30 p.m., contact Galep at (715) 962-3760 or e-mail her at galepc@hotmail.com.

Norton Lutheran Church is handicapped accessible with an elevator up to the sanctuary and down to the basement.