40 Days of WHAT?

When our third daughter was in kindergarten, her friends often would get off the bus with her at noon and have lunch at our house.  One spring day when our five-year-old neighbor Grant joined her for his favorite peanut butter sandwich, the two of them asked me to read them a story.  The Beginner’s Bible was sitting on the couch, so I began to read them the Easter story. 

At one point, Grant jumped up and exclaimed, “I had NO idea Jesus had anything to do with Easter!”

Lent precedes Easter as advent precedes the Nativity, a time of getting ready for what is coming, not just to decorate with bunnies and chocolate eggs, but preparing our hearts.  Lent is the fast before the feast. And empowers us to show up differently to the Easter celebration.  Not going through religious motions, but moving spiritually toward a deeper understanding of who Jesus is and what He has done. 

The question perhaps is not what are you giving up for Lent?  But what is God forming in me through this?

Lent is commonly known as a season of abstaining, when indeed it is the opposite. It enriches.

“Christians have always looked to suffering not only as a place of pain, but as a place of meeting God.  Suffering does not merely happen to us.  It works in us,” states Tish Harrison Warren in her book Prayer In The Night.

What if for Lent we fast or give up, not something we like or dislike, but something that has a strong hold on us?  What if for 40 days we gave up anxiety and fear?  What if we obeyed God’s most repeated commandment, Fear not. I am with you. Be anxious for nothing. What if I fast from those things?

Oh, I can come up with a long list of excuses not to.  But I need to realize that anxiety and fear are not my friends.  They are not welcome here.  And they keep me from trusting God.

Ann Voskamp writes in her book The Broken Way,  “I don’t know how to smooth out angst or stress or worry, but I know you either leave your worries with God … or your worries will make you leave God.”

But if I decide to refrain/give up/relinquish anxiety and fear for Lent, what do I replace it with?  That dynamic duo is firmly lodged in my practices and won’t easily let go.

I know, because Ash Wednesday night – the beginning of Lent --, I didn’t sleep well at all.  I woke up in the middle of the night and whoa! Name the fear or anxiety as they opened the door for a wild party and invited the whole gang. It was a raucous family reunion.

But if anxiety and fear are surgically removed with great intention on our part, the vacuum it creates, the gaping space as it leaves, just invites in more of their cousins.  If we do not choose to trust God in our circumstances, other little-g gods gladly rush in to take God’s rightful place.

Lent is the perfect opportunity to change our defaults.  God enters in. And helps us to not just think with another perspective, but be changed by it.

Is it anxiety – or just urgency to pray? If I didn’t worry, would I pray as much? Or would I pray differently?

What have we attached ourselves to instead of trusting God?  He whispers to us another way through our difficulties and concerns, “Try this instead.”

And as the fog gradually lifts, we can discern perhaps the first vestiges of healing and the 2 x 4’s of restoration beginning to be revealed.

If we ignore the season of Lent, does Easter just become another weekend or an excuse to get together for a meal with friends and family and eat chocolate?  Worship is often just a side dish, if time for it at all.

In the church liturgical calendar, Lent lies outside “ordinary time.”  We come before Him at Lent not that God would remember us, see us, listen to us, or that we would somehow pay for or make up for our sin, but that we would remember Him, see Him in the ordinary and extraordinary, respond to Him, and believe in Him beyond a reasonable doubt.  In our pain, we cry out, “O God, do something supernatural.” And God replies, “I am!”

In Lent, we are not giving up anything, but giving and receiving.   It is a kind of worship that changes us. We are not paying for our sin in preparation for Easter.  Jesus already did that. But we remember His sacrifice for us.  Because without Good Friday, there is no Easter.

We drag our sins to the altar, and realize Jesus is already there.  That is why He came. Lent helps us remember that, like climbing a steep hill and discovering that we can see into eternity as a result. The hardship we did not expect turns into a surprising blessing we would never turn away.

What does Lent make possible?  If we don’t try, we will never know.