It started one Lenten season when people start talking about purging something bad from their lives, the way Good
Christians do when that season comes.
Everyone talks about what they are giving up; listeners ooh and ahh
about the willpower and holiness exhibited, and mutual admiration flits about
the room and everybody’s halo gets bigger and brighter.
It’s so much pressure.
I had never successfully given up anything for Lent
before. All my efforts at fasting
revolved around giving up things that I didn’t do anyway, like robbing
banks. I always found a way to replace
the given up thing with something else, like the one time I gave up drinking
wine and I drank vodka instead.
Missing the whole point of Lent was my specialty.
I heard the conversations about what Lent was all about, to
reach out to God when you feel weak during a fast, to pray and pray and pray
when you decide to abstain from pizza and your show up to a dinner party and
the host is serving pizza.
At some point I heard that giving up something for Lent isn’t
worth much if we only give it up for six weeks.
If we give up pizza for 40 days and have a pizza party on day 41, how strong
is our faith? It’s only been tested for
40 days. Have we really grown, or changed anything
about our lives?
This, along with the fact that I had thus far proven to be
a failure at giving anything up for 40 days, bothered me. Lent felt like a religion contest, and
I’m not interested in that kind of competition.
I already felt like enough of a hypocrite when I reflected on my
sins. Imagine how relieved I felt when
the conversation veered off into a direction that I had never considered: How
about adding something to our lives for 40 days?
This interested me.
I am much better at adding something good than taking something bad away,
especially if I thoroughly enjoy it, and if I could make it a thing that
strengthened my faith, then I would be much better off anyway. If I added something that might take away
from the time I spent doing something bad, then I was on my way to better living
overall.
I decided to read a daily devotional, write about it, and
make this a part of my morning routine.
It was doable: I am a morning person anyway, so starting off the day
reading something uplifting with coffee sounded like the perfect thing. That it was simple, quick, and could be
faith-building added to the appeal. So
one Sunday after church I grabbed a daily devotional book off the information
shelf, bought a composition book at the drugstore, and planned to start the
following day.
I loved it. It was
so simple, so quick, so faith-building, that I kept going.
That was three years ago, and I never gave up this Lenten
practice. Yes, I skip days. Sometimes a week here and there. But I always go back to it.
It is not a perfect practice. I am not perfect, and do not deserve a pat on
the back. Sometimes I find myself
growing bored with my insights to God’s word, zipping through the devotional
time just to get it over with. I am
nothing if not task-oriented.
But I keep going, because the times when I really learn
something new about God and faith are worth it.
The frequency with which the reading contains a theme that I so need to
hear amazes me.
I am not planning on ending this Lenten add-on anytime
soon. It still works for me; it has
become part of my life and my faith.
Plus, the pressure of Lent is no longer there. My halo is far from the biggest or the
brightest, but I feel okay about working on it all year long instead of just 40
days.
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While I really love the season of Lent, I always hated the "giving up" part - not because it was so awful to give something up, but like you said - giving up meat on Friday to eat shrimp scampi instead seemed silly. Give up for forty days and then go back? Pointless. My Mom always suggested rather than give up something, why not work on adding something - like you talked about here. Add being nice to someone you don't get along with or add time to study the Word. Giving up works sometimes - like I should definitely give up swearing...that would be a definite positive. But the focus on doing more rather than taking away just makes more sense to me.
ReplyDeleteGiving up swearing is one that I've never attempted. Also one of my bad habits, but admittedly one that I really enjoy. :/
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