LENT DAYS...

Ash Wednesday
is the gateway to Lent. We have forty precious days to open ourselves up most particularly to God,

to examine ourselves in the presence of one who created us, knows us, and loves us. We have forty days to face

ourselves and learn to not be afraid of our sinfulness. We are dust, and to dust we shall return, but with God’s grace we

can learn to live this life more fully, embracing our sinfulness, allowing God to transform us

Lent
is about mortality and transformation. We begin the season of Lent on Ash Wednesday with the sign of the cross

smeared on our foreheads with ashes as the words are spoken over us, "Dust thou art, and to dust thou wilt return."

We begin this season of Lent not only reminded of our death, but also marked for death.

The Lenten journey, with its climax in Holy Week and Good Friday and Easter, is about participating in the death

and resurrection of Jesus. Put somewhat abstractly, this means dying to an old identity the identity conferred by culture,

by tradition, by parents, perhaps and being born into a new identity an identity centered in the Spirit of God. It means

dying to an old way of being, and being born into a new way of being, a way of being centered once again in God.

Put slightly more concretely, this path of death and resurrection, of radical centering in God, may mean for some of us

that we need to die to specific things in our lives perhaps to a behavior or a pattern of behavior that has become

destructive or dysfunctional; perhaps to a relationship that has ended or gone bad; perhaps to an unresolved grief

that needs to be let go of; perhaps to a career or job that has either been taken from us or that no longer nourishes us;

or perhaps even we need to die to a deadness in our lives.

You can even die to deadness, and this dying is also oftentimes a daily rhythm in our lives that daily occurrence

that happens to some of us as we remind ourselves of the reality of God in our relationship to God; that reminder

that can take us out of ourselves, lift us out of our confinement, take away our feeling of being burdened and weighed down.

That's the first focal point of a life that takes Jesus seriously that radical centering in the Spirit of God that is at the very center of the Christian life.

Have a Holy & Prayerful Lenten Season ahead