It’s Lent.  Welcome to the desert of the real.  

Part of what Lent does in and for us is lead us into a space where we can question the standard narrative of our lives—that story where we are mostly good, mostly compassionate, always right.  In Lent, the threads of that narrative get tugged at.  God’s Spirit does the tugging, because we can scarcely do it for ourselves.  After all, we’re the ones who knit that story and are covering ourselves with it.  

But the desert does things to a person, and God will take our half-willing openness and ask a question—maybe just a single word.  “What are you doing here, Elijah?” (1 Kings 19:9).  “What do you want me to do for you?” (Mark 10:51).  “Do you wish to go away also?” (John 6:67).  “Mary,” (John 20:16).  That word from God will scissor our self-story right down the middle.  Fearsome stuff for those who are alive to experience it.  A word snags something true, and the threads of our narrative self unravel a little.  

This is why we need the disciplines of relinquishment during Lent: giving, prayer, and fasting.  Those happen to be the first disciplines, the ones Jesus lodged right at the heart of his Sermon (Matthew 6:1-18).  We can’t do much—become much—without them.  It’s only in beginning to relinquish the set stories of our lives that Jesus will show us something realer.  He’ll speak a few words of a new story into that relinquished space.  He’ll sew something better than fig leaves.

I learned to pray when I learned to fast.  All throughout that Lent when I made my first tentative attempts at fasting, I took lunches from my job in the theological library to sit in an empty chapel and gaze up at the stone-wreathed stained glass.  I was praying for my wife’s immigration papers to come through, prayer over a life that was about to definitively become something else, and I knew not what.  And through it all, God was up to something more in me.  That fasting and prayer made space for me to receive something bigger than resolving my immediate longing and hopes and fears.  

The Spirit calls us to embrace the gift of Lent—sand arid, scree sharp, but open and horizonal as grace.  

What word from God is catching on your heart?