Lent

Today starts Lent.  Those forty days that tread on the road to Easter morning.  I never paid much attention to them before.  It's a busy time -- these forty days.  There's two birthdays in the family to celebrate, usually a recital or two to practice for, the end of school is in sight , yet so much more work needs to be done.

My grandpa, a Catholic, observes Lent.  And that's all that I knew about it.  Yet, there is something about Easter.  You shouldn't just come about the day, and celebrate it.  You need to build up to it, and savor it, and dwell on it much longer than one day out of three hundred and sixty-five.  Easter isn't a holiday, it's a lifestyle.  And Lent is the time set aside to clear our minds and our hearts, realigning our hearts with the reality of what Easter means.

I don't know why I paid attention to the idea this year.  Maybe it was because for the past month, as I was interning on the creative arts team at my church, we were preparing for forty days of Church-wide prayer.  Creating content for an initiative to pray for those who don't know our Savior with the intent to do something about it.  And it made me think about Easter differently.  It isn't just a holiday, it's a revolutionary concept that can change your life.

Maybe it was a song, stuck in my heart as I surfed the internet, filling my mind with mindlessness.  Garbage in, Garbage out, What goes in is found out, All can see what goes in me, I pay the price...



Lizzie says that the song is annoying.  It sticks in her head.  Yet, that's the point, isn't it?  What goes into my heart stays there, gets stirred around, and comes back out again in some way, some form.  In this case, it's a melody.  In some cases, not so much.

So maybe all this made me decide to focus, for forty days, on something more than mindless monotony that the world unceasingly chants.  It tries to lull me to sleep.  And here I am, with a Love so explosive, so beyond comprehension -- yet I'm drifting to sleep.

This year I want a Lent that drives me to see Joy in something beyond myself.  In something beyond the internet and the TV.  In something beyond material things, and the possessiveness of me. I want to breathe out something else these next forty days, and forever, really.  I want the reality of Easter -- of a brutal murder of a radical God and of a power that brings a dead Man to life to change humanity forever -- to be what people notice in me.