Pain in the Ash
Enter into the deep dark season - Part 1 of my Lenten Journal
Lent is a season of spiritual reflection and growth. But an important part of that spiritual journey is—if we’re doing it right—trial.
The past few Lenten seasons have been very trying for me and I don’t look forward to the season anymore. They’ve been trying—treacherous, really—mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. It’s like God saves his best smiting for Lent. His best tests, his best ‘gotchas’, his best recreations of the book of Job; he saves the best for Lent. That’s how it seems, anyway.
Lent has been hard for me. I sometimes say—half jokingly, but only half—that I wish I could fly away from it for 40 days the way people fly to someplace warm to escape the winter. Or the way one might get the hell out of Dodge for a few days because a bad storm is on the way. They cheat the system. They just get away and let the hard stuff pass. Cushion themselves in a little luxury, or just distractions. When the hard stuff passes, and the darkness dwindles in submission to the warm sunshine, they return.
“I will not deal with the dark! And you can’t make me.”
But Lent isn’t a storm, or an actual dark night. Fly to Alabama, or move to Mars, it’s still Lent. Convert to another religion, it’s still Lent.
“Gotcha, sucker!”
You can’t outpace it.
“Nigh and nigh draws the chase, With unperturbèd pace,..” (The Hound of Heaven)
Whatever God has in store for me during Lent, His will will be done. He is the Hound of Heaven.
That is how I view Lent nowadays.
“What terrible things do you have up those great sleeves this year, Lord!”
(And “wherefore, wherefore fall on me?”)
If you’re paying attention you might be thinking, correctly, that God doesn’t force anything on anyone. That’s true. Lent only seems to chase me down because despite my desire to run and hide, my will chooses to stand and “face it” I choose to “do the season” because I know that to ignore it, to not participate in it, to not be engaged in it would be to lie to myself. To tell myself “This doesn’t really matter”
It does matter. So, here I am. I point my bow toward the night storm.
“Here comes the dark. What surprises hide in there this time?”
From there, deep in there, a whisper simultaneously taunts and terrifies me,
“Come and see.”