Hanging in There
Let me tell you something about Lent. Lent, seriously approached, is a drag.
It is a real pain to be thinking about whether it’s a Wednesday or Friday and so avoiding meat. It’s a real pain to be constantly confronted by the desire for whatever it is that you’ve given up. Self examination? Depressing. The whole thing is just not any fun.
Of course, as I noted in last week’s newsletter, God really does use our spiritual discipline - not just during Lent, but always - to weaken the things in us that need to wither away and to strengthen what needs to grow. Lent, properly undertaken, is like a spiritual workout regimen, and like any new discipline, can be a real challenge. And as with a physical workout regimen, our motivation comes from a realization that things need to change.
“Come as you are” was the advertising campaign for an evangelical congregation in North Georgia a few years ago. The whole pitch was that there was no need to do anything special or to undertake any trouble to go to church. Just roll out of bed and go, they seemed to say. The corollary was “God loves you as you are”.
And it’s true that God loves us as we are. It’s also true that God wants us to come to him as we are. The problem is that the clothes we’re wearing don’t constitute what we are. Our own self-image doesn’t constitute who we are. To come to God as we are means to come to him acknowledging that (in the words of the Confession before each of the Daily Offices in the Prayer Book) “[w]e have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts … and there is no health in us”. We have no choice but to come to God as we are, just as hospital emergency rooms take patients as they present themselves seeking treatment and healing. People come as they are to the emergency room, but we pray that they don’t leave it as they come, or worse. We pray that they leave having been treated and having been put at least on the road to wholeness and healing.
God loves us as we are, but we can rejoice in the fact that he doesn’t want to leave us as we are. He wants to work with us to let wither what needs to wither within us and to heal and strengthen what needs to grow. He wants to set us on the path to wholeness and healing. And one of the first steps in that direction is the frank assessment of our brokenness and need of healing. That’s what the focus on Lent is all about, at least in the first instance. And that’s why Lent can be such a pain.
Lent is an acknowledgment of failure and of wrong turnings taken, with an eye toward getting better. So don’t be discouraged if Lent seems hard, or if you’ve messed up your lenten rule, or if you never got around to making one to start with. If you haven’t started, now is a good time to begin. If you started and got off track, now is a good time to begin again. If you’ve gone on and off and on and off, now is a good time to begin again, again. Offer your challenges and frustrations and failures to God, and he will use them to work your healing.
No one rejoices in the destination like those who have had a hard journey. No one loves the sunrise like those who have waited fearfully through a long night. No one welcomes the Feast of the Resurrection like those who have trudged wearily through Lent, trying in at least some small way to deny themselves. Hang in there! God is taking us as we are to make us like himself. That is the promise of Easter.
—JB+
