I’ll never forget my first experience with Lent.
I grew up in a home where we didn’t really celebrate Lent. I had never experienced an Ash Wednesday service and had no idea that entire swaths of Christendom fasted during the 40 weekdays leading up to Easter. In college, I had a Catholic friend who one year gave up pizza and the next year gave up sweets and I thought it was a strange little practice that only Roman Catholics did. Imagine my surprise when I got hired to serve at a Protestant church where Lent was a thing. Like, a real thing, where they wanted me to create programming for families and children that helped them to experience Lent.
Needless to say, I started doing research, familiarizing myself with the customs of Lent and all the traditions surrounding its practice, and set forth to provide the best programming I could. Until someone asked me, “What are you giving up for Lent?”
“Oh,” I responded hastily, “I haven’t really felt the Lord telling me to give anything up so I’ll just wait for a nudge from Him.” Whew, sidestepped that little snafu. Except for the fact that a few minutes later, while in conversation with another person, I uttered these fateful words, “Seriously though, I could not live without bread and cheese.”
Nudge.
Did I really just say that?!?
Right before Lent?
Oh my goodness, I’ve gotta give up bread and cheese for 40 days!
Because, you see, it wasn’t about the bread and cheese (and pizza and bagels with cream cheese and cheesecake and…). It was about my careless words that betrayed my own heart. Of course, we all know, I could actually live without bread and cheese but “from the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks” (Mt. 12:34 KJV).
Lent isn’t about giving up something we love just for the sake of fulfilling an obligation or completing a religious task. My guess is that we all “know” that. But take a moment and really think about it; what can you not “live” without? What could spill from your mouth carelessly from the overflow of your heart? What just popped into your head or crossed your mind?
Nudge.
Lent is about our heart and the overflow thereof. It’s about soberly reflecting on our need for a Savior. It’s about understanding that Easter wasn’t an event that took place years ago so that we could “be saved”; no, Lent is about recognizing we need Easter every moment of every day, that we need resurrection because we cannot truly live without it.
This month we are engaging with the means of grace of fasting. Each Friday, we, as a community, are going to be invited to observe a Wesley fast together. That means we will fast from sundown on Thursday through sundown on Friday and break our fast at that time. What if that thing that came to mind was the thing you fasted from for those Fridays? What if, on those Fridays, you meet your heart right where it truly is, face the careless words and thoughts within, and give them to Jesus in exchange for resurrection and true life?
I still LOVE bread and cheese and I am willing to pay a pretty penny for a decent pizza or a New York bagel…but I can live without them. What I can’t live without is a Savior.
