Years of Lent in Community

The season of Lent started this past Wednesday.  I took the ashes on my forehead after watching a handful of children so their parents could be at the noon service.  As I took the ashes, I still was questioning what I would give up and fast from this year.

I have been at Ecclesia Church for, 8 years (I think), and before that my husband and I went to several different Lutheran churches so the concept of Lent was not new to us when we arrived at Ecclesia. I do believe that it has taken on a different meaning, however, being in a community that actively pursues the season of Lent together.  The deeper feeling of being in a community of believers journeying together through the liturgical calendar is something I think you have to come to after years of the practice.  Stick around and you will find your Lenten journey evolving.  I can imagine a group of beautiful 80 year old friends who have journeyed in seasons of their lives, understanding and walking together, and what that must feel like.  This week I found myself remembering back through the years, this act of giving up, the loss that somehow always finds us during this season & the sense of doing it together that is fostered.

I remember the first year at Ecclesia, giving up television, it was difficult but I remember learning so much about being a parent without any media.  I learned so much that we decided to get rid of the television all together and have not had one since.  Thinking back about it now... it seems like I used some of those early seasons of Lenten fasting as self improvement.  I kind of sat with the idea of simplifying during that season and inevitably added some part of the practice to my everyday life after the fast was over.  I think this was a beautiful way for me to "try out" intentional living and even though I learned something beautiful, I am not sure this is what the Lenten fast is supposed to represent.  Over the years I have quietly fasted from television, shopping, facebook, eating out, and various foods like sugar, caffeine, bread, meat.  Each time I learned something about myself and I will not deny that Jesus spoke to me during that time of setting aside something for Him.

As the years have moved forward, several seasons were marked by extreme loss. Each time those profound deaths in the community always seemed to come right around the Lenten season.  In fact, 11 years ago during Lent my own mother died.  Over the years at Ecclesia, a close friends son was shot down in a gang shooting, another friends son died in a police shooting in front of her, and then dear Sarah Chidgey right as Lent began was gone.  And that is just to name a few, there were other friends who's parents died or who struggled with other loss. I had never grieved in community in this way, never hugged the neck and cried along side dear friends with our pastor crying openly as a model of how to grieve.  As these seasons of Lent have evolved the feeling of this being something I am not doing alone has grown as well.

It also makes my humble efforts of "giving up" feel like empty offerings.  One year, marked by one of the deaths mentioned above, I was in the middle of a difficult time in my marriage.  I did not "give up" anything because it felt like God was already taking my marriage away.  I guess I was angry, looking back at it, and I think God saw my anger and understood.  In a way I was giving up my marriage, in a way acknowledging that feeling was good for me.  I gave away this key relationship to Him, knowing full well I might not get it back.  I also knew that it was the only hope I had, to give it over to Him and yield to what He had for us.  It probably saved my marriage, the loosing of it I mean.

Over the years as this heaviness has grown, giving up something like coffee seemed like a shallow offering.  Once you have seen a friend give up her son or their closest, dearest, most beloved friend.  Really coffee? So I moved to wanting to give up things like "negative thoughts".  I tried and failed at this one last year. I mean "negative thoughts" this falls under the category of "I do the very things I do not want".  It was a pretty futile effort to say the least.

This year, I had been researching and reading about a plastics fast.  Knowing that my attempt would end up being impossible and thinking that act might echo what was going on internally.  But as Lent approached, that seemed more like an act of self learning again.  What I wanted to give up, I said jokingly, was being sick and my children being sick.  If you could give up sickness, sadness, negative self talk, loneliness, a broken heart, physical pain, emotional anguish, death and dying... wouldn't you?  And so... as I struggled with what to give up... and in a season of a unique struggle for my family with multiple viruses hitting in one month back to back.  A season with a child covered in chicken pox, knowing no matter how much I want to give up sickness for Lent, the pox will go thru their cycle and they will inevitably infect my son as well.  So I, frustrated and spent, decide to surrender again to that simple act of giving up something small.  An item that feels so silly and worthless in the overall scheme of things about as small as my attempt at it is to Him.  In that small act I guess I am acknowledging my size in His picture.  Meaningless, but a good way to practice giving over my sickness, negative thoughts, sinful nature, loneliness, physical pain, emotional anguish, death and dying. Practice giving over the things I can not.

This Lenten fast, the simplest act of self sacrifice it is.  With a prayer, from Job, which I have been reading since I saw THE TREE OF LIFE last week. If you haven't seen it, watch it as part of your Lenten devotion...

Then Job said to God, “I am overwhelmed! Now I see—no, truly feel—who You are! Nothing and no one can challenge Your plans. You asked, ‘Who is this man I gave his mind who dares question my choices from a scope so small? Do I need my servant’s approval before I move?’

I confess it: I babbled of things beyond my bumbling. You dared me face You down as if Your equal, Which I am not, and never was, nor will be. All I knew of You before was husks of hearsay, fifth-hand rumors, others’ empty certitudes.

But now, in my nakedness, I have encountered You— YOU!

Now, I loathe my arrogant pretentiousness, and I humbly repent in dust and ashes.”