Pennies and Palm Trees + Lent

Last Wednesday was Ash Wednesday, a day in the traditional church calendar set aside for remembering that we are dust, and to dust we shall return. In many churches, Ash Wednesday is an extremely somber affair. It is the reminder that we are not the end all-be all. It also begins the season of Lent, 40 days (plus Sundays) leading up to Jesus's death and resurrection on the cross. For many people, like many churches, lent is a very somber affair. It is all about fasting the thing you love the most, giving up your favorite food, disconnecting your cable, removing sugar from your diet. Somewhere along the line, Lent became what we were giving up. The trials of removing a central thing from our lives for 40 days became so forefront that the entire reason for fasting during lent is lost in the process.

It would be easy for me to sit here and rewrite what lent means to me, spending a half hour spelling out why I love lent, with new metaphors, new language, new anything. But I feel like that would be falling into the pit we have already dug for ourselves in lentan tradition: making it about us instead of about Christ. So instead of doing that, I'm going to copy+paste my Lent-Is-Starting post from last year (pulled of my tumblr, so you may or may not have come across this before).

"As a Luthern, or at least as a member of Trinity Lutheran Church, I grew up spending this night attending a somber service in which our pastor would remind “Woman, remember that you are created from dust, and to dust you shall return” and sign the cross on our foreheads in ashes. For as long as I can remember I wondered why we had our Ash Wednesday service at night and all of the Catholic kids had theirs in the morning before school. Wouldn’t people think that I was a bad Christian if I didn’t have that indecipherable gray smudge on my forehead all day long? I remember one year in middle school when I ran to the bathroom between walking to school and attending first period so that I could smudge my own cross on my forehead, the charcoal art pencils in my backpack replacing the symbolic ashes. I had no idea what the point was, but wanted to be dedicated enough to be one of those weird kids with the ashes on their foreheads all day. Or at least I wanted people to think I was that dedicated. What was the point in having Pastor smudge ashes on my head at all if the only people that were going to see it were the ones who I already went to church with anyway?

Fortunately, my strange gravitation to the visibility of the Ash Wednesday forehead cross got left behind with many of my other middle school misconceptions of the world. But my confusion as to the real point of lent took a lot longer to grow out of. My childhood self saw lent as the time when the colors would change on the altar coverings and pastor’s robes and we could start thinking about dyeing Easter eggs. My middle school self remembers Lent as the time when Confirmation classes (from 3:15-5:00, effectively extending the Wednesday school day) blurred into an hour of homework time leading into Wednesday night soup dinners and Lent services and I couldn’t go home until 8:00 when the whole long day was finally over. My high school self started trying to play the Lentan fasting game, giving up swearing, or soda, or candy, or something equally “acceptable” but meaningless, and ultimately failing to get past week 2 or 3 without abandoning the idea altogether. What was the point of fasting anyway? I knew that Jesus died on the cross for me, and I believed, that’s all that mattered. Right?

Well, yes.

But also no. It is by faith and grace alone that we are saved. Fact. If my only point is to guarantee my spot in heaven, I’m good. But woah, how lame of a point is that when there is so much else being offered to us on a silver platter?

But that’s a whole other topic in and of itself. Back to Lent.

On Flood’s opening introduction to 2010’s daily Lent devotional blog, I found this written in the last paragraph. “One of the challenges we face is that we can easily separate God from this season. We prove to ourselves and others that we can handle the challenge. It’s a challenge of the will. “

I think those three sentences sum up for me what Lent always was. My challenge wasn’t (isn’t) accidentally separating God from the season, but putting God into it to begin with. I fasted, because everyone else did. I went to Lent soup dinners, because I could stay away from my parents that way. I wore a cross on my forehead, so people would look at me and think I was awesome (I don’t know how being a weirdo with charcoal on my forehead equated with awesome in middle school, but you know, middle school.) It wasn’t until my senior year of high school that I really started realizing that lent was meant to be something more than an opportunity to prove to the world that I could be a “great Christian.” And it probably isn’t until this year that I’ve actually cared enough to do it right.

You see, fasting, or giving something up, for Lent isn’t about whether we can accomplish 40 days without something we love, whether we can beat a vice for 6 weeks, or whether we can follow the strict rules except for on Sundays when we cheat [2011 A/N: Sundays aren't about cheating, which is how "you can eat the thing your fasting on Sundays" has always translated to me in the past. Its about Feasting. The bible is full of the two things paired together. We must fast AND feast. On Sundays in Lent, we celebrate the resurrection every week, with a feast of thanksgiving.] It’s not about beating yourself and growing better self discipline. It’s about spending more time with God.

The advent season (pre-Christmas) is for preparing for Jesus’s birth. Lent is ultimately about preparing for his death and resurrection. We give something up to make more room for Him in our period of waiting. The purpose of fasting, or at least what I’ve come to understand the purpose of fasting to be, is that at each moment when we crave the food, activity, drink, whatever it is that we’ve given up, at each moment when we crave it, we think about God. It’s a trigger, a tripline, a sign post pointing upwards. Or, if you’ve given up some time consuming activity—say TV or the internet—it’s a space MAKER. Instead of a simple reminded to have a chat with dad, it’s creating the time where you before had none.

And all to the point of having a deeper relationship. Nothing has ever gotten me closer to my faith than making space for prayer. And I mean think about it: have you ever had a good relationship with someone when you don’t make the time of day to talk to them? Don’t you think our relationship with God has similar properties? How can we get to know him better if we don’t spend any time conversing?

It’s also about sitting.

This season of Lent, for me, is about making space and about sitting. It’s about reclaiming the prayer spaces that I made for myself in Uganda and about relearning how to sit in God’s presence without doing. It’s about being Mary for a little while instead of Martha. I am so dang good at being Martha. Being Mary is way harder. (See Luke 10:38-42). It’s about choosing what is better.

So excuse me while I turn off my facebook and wake up a little earlier, while I run away to the beach when I should be studying (probably), while I write uselessly long journal entries about a faith that few of my friends who will read them actually share, while I seem to waste a lot of time not doing. Today is Ash Wednesday, and today I, Woman, remember that from dust I was created and to dust I will return, and that it is only by the grace one man gave to me by sacrificing his all too real life that I can claim my birthright as God’s own child and become anything more than molecules and science facts. Today I start sitting."

This year, I begin Lent in a different place than I did last year. My growth group and I have been discussing how much different we feel from the person who we were little more than a year ago. But strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, how I feel about Lent and the invitation for fasting that God has given me for this year is almost identical to last year. I'm just lucky this year, because the discipline of fasting is something He and I have already been working on. So instead of asking me to Sit for lent this year, he's asking me to decrease my input and increase my output, because sitting before Him and with him has already become a part of my daily routine.

Decrease my Input; Increase my Output.

What in the world?

If any of your have taken the Gallup's Strengths Finders test and/or spoken to me about my top 5, you may know a little something about "input" and "intellection". These are simply two vocabulary words that help me to describe something I already know about myself: I obsessively take in information (and stuff) and my brain is constantly turning over all that information in my head (whether it be "knowledge", facts, or people habits I've observed.) I drink up books, audiobooks, blogs, websites, sermons, basically anything, like someone who's been thirsty for years.

Well, God's giving me a heads up that I do a little bit too much of that, and quite a bit too little of talking to Him without the added outside input (this also includes music).

So Step 1 of Lent this year is to turn down the noise. Unplug from being so plugged into Twitter. Don't check my facebook while I'm at a stoplight just because I have a phone that can. Leave/Put the books He hasn't asked me specifically to read in a box. Drive in silence. Go to sleep either listening to the scripture or nothing at all.

But there's a Step 2 as well.

He wants me to stop just thinking and pick back up writing. Write about Him and the amazing things He is doing, every day. Blog. Tweet. Change my facebook status. Paint and upload the pictures. Upload whatever project I've been working on. POUR OUT.

Basically, it comes down to this. Take all the streams that have been pouring into me and reduce them to one: Him. Then, stop simply letting all that living water seep out of the cracks and fill me to bursting; Intentionally pour it out.

The reason I blog this initial post is to explain why you may see me around facebook or twitter or whatever social media interaction we have, but won't see me comment on YOUR status, or respond to YOUR tweet, or read YOUR blog. Sounds selfish and self-absorbed, I know. I'm going to write and not read? Bad relationship patterns there. But it's about continuing to be willing to out pour what he gives me while shutting out the distractions for a time. This is actually going to be more difficult than what I did last year in simply giving up social media. Because this means I actually still have to go to my facebook, login to twitter, check into tumblr, but control my desire to scroll around and see what everyone else is up to.

End point: Refine the Intake; Expand the Outpouring.

Lots and lots of love!

(and a better explanation of what the heck Pennies and Palm trees is to come).