While Walking with Purpose Founder Lisa takes time to write our next women’s Bible study, Laura Phelps welcomes guest Caitlin Bean to the Hope for Right Now podcast for a seven-week series: Desert Bloom, A Lenten Journey.

Lent is a time of sacrifice, preparation, and spiritual waiting—a time to prepare our hearts for Easter through prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. For many of us, it has become about exterior performance, a “holy checklist” we begin on Ash Wednesday and struggle to sustain for 40 days. And preparation? Who has time for that? We are exhausted—after all, it was just Christmas!

If this is how your heart feels at the start of Lent, this series is for you—offering practical encouragement, Scripture reflections, and simple ways to experience a more meaningful, peace-filled Lent.

In today’s episode, Laura and Caitlin talk about our new Lenten devotional, Desert Bloom: Discovering Unexpected Joy in the Wilderness, and share their personal Lenten fails and the idols they need to lose, while uncovering the fear behind letting go of achieving God’s love in exchange for simply receiving it.

Open your Heart to our key Scripture.
Hebrews 12:2: For the joy set before Him, He endured the Cross.

Open your Bible to other Scriptures referenced in this episode.
Philippians 3:13–14: One thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.
Isaiah 43:18–19: Remember not the former things, or consider the things of old. Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.
Deuteronomy 2:7: For the Lord your God has blessed you in all the work of your hands; he knows you are going through this great wilderness; these forty years the Lord your God has been with you; you have lacked nothing.
Exodus 16:2–3: And the whole congregation of the people of Israel murmured against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness, and said to them, “Would that we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate bread to the full; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.”

Invite Him in with this episode’s questions for reflection.
What is your idol? What do you want more than God?
Do you approach Lent like a spiritual performance review?
How is the Lord inviting you to undo the production narrative you’ve been telling yourself? 

Show mentions.
Caitlin Bean and Laura Phelps, Desert Bloom: Discovering Unexpected Joy in the Wilderness
Michelle Benzinger, Abiding Together Podcast
Saint John of the Cross, “The Lord measures out perfection neither by the multitude nor the magnitude of our deeds, but by the manner in which we perform them.”

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