If your baby cries out in the middle of the night, you will run to comfort him? If your mother enters Hospice Care you will take your place by her bedside? If your wife has surgery you will take time off work to help her recover? Because you know this impulse by heart, you know the purpose of Lent. The 40 days prior to Easter, known as Lent, give all of us the chance to remember that God runs towards us whenever we need care simply because God is madly in love with us.
The unusual practices of Lent are reminders that we actually long for that God to come our direction and hang out with us. Somehow we get it in our minds that we are self-sufficient and don’t actually need God. Or even more distorted, we think that God will only come towards us if we are disciplined enough to read the Bible daily and give up chocolate for 40 days.
The Lenten disciplines were designed not to earn God’s favor but rather to get our attention, to expose our own human vulnerabilities: loneliness, frustration, anger, fear. It is easier to pretend that we have no anxiety, no self-doubt, no bad habits, no addictions, no grudges. But Lent invites us to wake up. When do we cry out in out in the middle of the night, needing God to hold us and remind us that we are not alone? When do we face the fact that our days on this earth are numbered and we want to make them count by spending them with those we love? When do we realize that our souls need surgery so that we can thrive again?
Perhaps it is perfect that Ash Wednesday falls on Valentines Day. Love after all, is the reason we kneel. We place the ashes on our head, to admit our human frailty and experience again the holy joy of God running towards us with a love that will not let us go.
– Rev. Carla Aday
