The city came and chopped down the diseased Ash tree between the sidewalk and the street in front of our house. And just recently, a red flag appeared in the snow, and a note saying they would soon be replacing the tree with a new planting. I laugh every time I back out of the driveway and see that little red flag in the snow. Will the snow ever really melt and the ground soften enough for a new tree to take root?

The season of Lent beckons us to this cycle of transformation from death to life, from pain to joy, from despair to hope. The 40 days, which is Biblical speak for “a long time” provide space for us to consider what needs to be cut down so that new life can rise up. Originally a season for new converts to the faith in the first centuries after Jesus, the six weeks preceding Easter were set aside for prayer and fasting to prepare new Christians for baptism on Easter.

The artist Georgia O’Keefe looked at a tiny one inch white jimsom weed flower and then painted it to stretch across a canvas 3 by 4 feet. When asked why she painted it so large, which no one had ever done before, she said it was so that you couldn’t keep from looking at it. It seems to me that Lent does that same thing for us. It forces us to look at the enormous love of God who walked a dusty road to the cross in flesh like ours. And when we see that expansive love, we suddenly see our own lives differently.

The theologian Stanley Hauerwas says “We fear God because we fear knowing who we are.” Lent is the season to look again at God and know ourselves in a new way, as God’s own beloved. And who knows, maybe a tree will grow.

Grace and peace,

Carla