Welcome to the Passion Week Prayer Stations — At Home Edition
This journey is designed for you to read, pray and visualize your way through the final events leading to Jesus’ Death. There is no resolution here intentionally, we’ll leave Easter Sunday to take care of that. We want you to sit in the physical and spiritual reality of the Messiah being led to his death.
This is designed to be an individual experience although families with young children might prefer to modify the stations to involve everyone. Teenagers and adults can do it at the same time as other people, but it is between you and God. Discussion and conversation are excellent when you save them for reflection afterwards. If you are walking through the prayer stations at the same time as other family members you might want to suggest that the house stays quiet until everyone has had a chance to finish.
Prayer stations invite you to slow down. Turn off your cell phone and any music that you have playing. Enter into a different pace of life as you pause everything else to focus on Jesus. Think deeply and engage your mind and heart, take your time, read slowly and let the words of reflection sink in. Be open to what God has for you. We hope that through this experience you’ll see how your story is connected to and a continuation of God’s big story that began at creation.
Spend as long as you want in each station. If you’re drawn to stay at a particular spot for a longer time, you’re free to do so. Move on to the next station whenever you’re ready. Don’t feel pressured to move if others in your family leave a station before you do.
We encourage you to respond to God by writing your thoughts out in a notebook or on the sheets provided. You can write a word, write a prayer, draw a picture—whatever you want to do. You may feel like writing on some pages and not on others. That’s okay. Journaling is a space to get thoughts OUT of your head to show what’s actually going on in your soul. It allows you to reflect later on what you experienced. This Journey to the Cross is not about agendas or meeting anyone’s expectations. It’s simply a time and a place for you to draw close to Holy Spirit, Jesus, and The Father.
Helping You Visualize:
The hope for each station is to use physical objects and physical postures to help us connect, identify, and align with this part of the story of Jesus.
• Walk into the station space
• Read the station card and follow what it says
• Take pauses as you need
• Don’t rush to the next station
The point is to enter into a different form of worship than we are normally used to. We are so used to hearing stories but prayer stations calls us to experience the story. It allows us to walk through the story and know it differently than we did before this experience.
List of Needs: Make sure you have everything before you begin.
Bible, Notebook & Pen
Turn off your phone and put it away.
Station 1: Something that makes annoying noise. Eg. TV Static, alarm clock, game timer.
Station 2: A piece of leather apparel (belts, sandals etc).
Station 3: Sweet smelling essential Oil or other fragrance & cotton ball/pad
Station 4: Coins: Preferably old or foreign
Station 5: Bread & Oil
Station 6: Wine or juice
Station 7: Rope
Station 8: Passport
Station 9: Thorns/brambles
Station 10: Large Nails & Paper
Station 11: Candle lit from the start
Additional resources for further reading are included after station 11.
How to set up:
Decide when you are going to do it. Set aside 1-2 hours to go through this experience.
Purchase/gather all the items representative of each station. If you cannot obtain an item, try to think of a substitute or simply go without the item. The objects are to help with visualization, and the simple reading of the scripture will suffice.
Your set up can be as compact or as spread out as you prefer and are able. For example:
• In a larger house, each station can have its own room in the house, or at least have its own space within a room. This way you would physically “move” to the next station symbolizing your journey through this narrative.
• In a smaller townhouse or apartment, you can set the stations up in order around your living space and try to separate them as much as possible, or it can be as simple as have all the stations around your kitchen table, bringing the object of the next station towards you as you start the next station.
• Note that even in a small house, you might want to put station 1 in a separate room, maybe even a bathroom, so that the noise is separate from other participants.
If possible we recommend that you print off this document so that you are free from technology. When you set up each station, put one copy of each page for every individual participating. If you must have it on your device, turn on airplane mode and do not disturb.
If you have a large family, you may want to go through in shifts and start a few minutes apart to add to the individual feel.