Johnny and Hannah

This time of year invites great possiblities and for Mrs Hannah and I, as we have agreed;- no chocolate, no coffee and no alcohol as the plan… in these forty days…. it’s our invitation to a time of difference!
a more holy-frugal-denying-ourselves season! Lent is an often-overlooked season in the Church calendar. Lent is a communal experience…From year to year, there is overlap, there is continuity; in the dying and rising again in a familiar-and-yet-not-the-same way. Unless a seed falls to the ground and dies, it remains only one seed. It is next to useless. But if it is sown, it produces a harvest; a multiplied return on the original investment.

Lord, teach us how to lay down ourselves, our perceived adequacy and our perceived inadequacy; and let us instead be found to be beyond inadequacy in you.   

Lent is a time of re-calibrating and re-finding those limits and entering into the fulness of an authentic humanity. I therefore get to not be grumpy (!!) I mean….take part in a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s Holy Word.
And, to make a right beginning of repentance, and as a mark of our fragile and mortal nature, kneeling before the Lord, our maker and redeemer. This Lenten season is a doorway into a space in time that calls us to stop whatever we are doing and enter more intentionally into the disciplines ofprayer, self-examination and repentance. Left to ourselves, we probably would not choose to devote time to such rigorous and demanding disciplines, but God has purposed and prompted me for it this year more than most. In a very intentional way, we invite God to search us and know us and (eventually) to lead us into resurrection life. Facing our sin in the shadow of Christ’s crossand impending resurrection is the healthiest way to deal with our sin. The disciplines of fasting and other kinds of abstinence help us to face the hold that our sin patterns have on us and to somehow let go. They create space for the godly grief that leads to repentance. They ask us to consider how we might be called to give more of ourselves to others. There is no doubt that Lent requires something of us. But there can be no feasting without fasting. Entering into the Lenten discipline of giving up something in order to create more space for prayer is the fast that prepares us to fully enjoy the promise of Resurrection. Ready or not here we are!

This year, I must admit that I didn’t really feel quite ready for Lent with all of its demands and its disciplines. It seems to have come quickly and we have barely recovered from turning into this new year! But I also don’t want to miss anything. I don’t want to miss the possibility of having my life stripped down to a barer essence through some of the disciplines of abstinence. I don’t want to miss the possibility for repentance and change. I don’t want to miss the experience of resurrection in the places that I know have been deadened. There is something about the season of Lent that causes me to be hopeful about the possibility of repentance and forgiveness in my own life… hopeful about the possibility of greater freedom in places where I am in bondage… hopeful about the possibility of the biblical mystery of death, burial, and resurrection taking place in my life. So ready or not, my heart is also saying that I want to enter into Lent in a way thathas meaning and will change me somewhere deep inside where it matters.

I don’t want to just “give up chocolate for Lent” because I like chocolate and God is some sort of cosmic-spoil-sport who wants to keep it from me. I know that these few days of heightened disciplines will correspond to the places in my life that cry out for deeper levels of transformation. The dynamics of Lent have to do with abstaining from the ways we normally distract ourselves from spiritual reality—the reality of our sin and the deeply patterned behaviours that are obstructive in following Christ as God longs.
It has to do with allowing some of the external trappings of our lives to be stripped away so that we can find our true identity and calling in God afresh.
It has to do with facing the spiritual reality of the battle that Satan is waging for our very souls. There is such a temptation of life in leadership is that we can become so focused on leading others into a deeper experience of the spiritual life—it is our job, after all!—that we neglect to protect space for our own spiritual journeying. We put off paying attention to the places where God is calling us – ok me to the rigour of self-examination and repentance.

Joel 2: How will I repent and return to God? 

My prayer and my plea is that part of your own Lenten disciplines and bravely ask God, ‘Where in my life do I need to acknowledge my humanness and sinful struggles?’
What are the disciplines or godly-gifts that God wants me to use?

ps. and until then,
I have a constant taste for yearning and hunger right now!!