I always seek out a special book to accompany me through the Lenten season, one that speaks of the complex and sometimes contradictory nature of the extremes we ourselves experience during the six weeks between Ash Wednesday and Easter morning. Often I submerge myself in my friend Jerry Webber’s devotionals, books of quiet wisdom that meld introspection and inspiration beautifully. This year, I was asked to contribute one of the readings in a Lenten devotional—A Journey Into Wholeness: Soul Travel from Lent to Easter—compiled by contemplative activist Christine Sine, Executive Director of Mustard Seed Associates, a community-based organization that fosters shared values of simplicity, spirituality, sustainability and hospitality.

I plan to walk through the next forty-odd days with this book by my side. Like Christine, herself, the voices in the book manage to weave spiritual centering with compassionate faith. You can almost hear the book’s heart beating with love for a world in need. Not a world in need of proselytizing, but one in need of love given freely, with no strings attached.

This devotional does the dual job of taking us into our own brokenness, while simultaneously revealing ways we can impact the brokenness of the world around us—both in our daily microcosms and across the globe. Its perspective expanding in weekly increments, the book is divided into sections that resemble the concentric circles of a stone thrown in a pond, ever-widening in their ripples:

Week One: Journey into the Brokenness of our Inner Selves
Week Two: Journey into the Brokenness of Hunger
Week Three: Journey into the Brokenness of Homelessness
Week Four: Journey into the Brokenness of Creation
Week Five: Journey into the Brokenness of God’s Family

The final chapter of the book moves us, at long last, from the fully exposed brokenness of ourselves and our world through the final tumultuous week of death and joyous rebirth. Again, we are prompted to experience this, not only within but without—to make this experience about more than just ourselves.

One of the most practical aspects of the book is its extensive appendices which provide, not only books for further reading, but hands-on tools like recipes for meals that cost less than $2 per person for eating in solidarity for much of the world as part of the Mutunga Challenge laid out in the book. Unlike the typical devotional, this one includes ways to take the convictions you develop during this transformational season beyond its pages. You’ll find an abundance of resources for your heart-lead activism including facts, statistics and challenges on hunger, poverty and environmental issues.

If the book’s dedication—“To all who seek to journey with Jesus towards a deeper faith and a more centered life”—seems to be speaking to the yearnings of your heart, pick it up and open yourself to its words. Enter to win a copy by commenting below on ways you have traditionally set this season apart as sacred or by sharing faith-deepening ideas you will be trying out this year. Extra entries for tweeting about the giveaway and following me and Mustard Seed Associates on Twitter. Contest open through midnight Friday.