Please use one of the prompts below to get your journaling started.

• Explore your fears and what’s behind them.
• Write about a relational conflict you are experiencing.
• List out all that you are grateful for.
• Recall a significant reaction, conversation or event.

 Here are some tools to help you with the devotionals:

• A Guide to Journaling & Prayer
• A Guide to Self-Reflection
• A Chart to help articulate feelings

¹ It was now two days before the Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread. And the chief priests and the scribes were seeking how to arrest him by stealth and kill him, ² for they said, “Not during the feast, lest there be an uproar from the people.”

³ And while he was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he was reclining at table, a woman came with an alabaster flask of ointment of pure nard, very costly, and she broke the flask and poured it over his head. ⁴ There were some who said to themselves indignantly, “Why was the ointment wasted like that? ⁵ For this ointment could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii and given to the poor.” And they scolded her. ⁶ But Jesus said, “Leave her alone. Why do you trouble her? She has done a beautiful thing to me. ⁷ For you always have the poor with you, and whenever you want, you can do good for them. But you will not always have me. ⁸ She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for burial. ⁹ And truly, I say to you, wherever the gospel is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her.”

Questions to help us go deeper

Mark 14:3

• Why would the woman take “very costly” perfume and pour it out completely on Jesus? How is this like Jesus’ love poured out for me? What would it look like for me to live similarly?

Mark 14:4-8

• Contrast the perspective of those who were indignant and scolded the woman to that of Jesus.

Mark 14:9

• In what ways are this woman’s actions told “wherever the gospel is proclaimed in the whole world”?

•  Prayer