A funny thing happened a couple of months back: I finished my honey-do list.  A friend helped me replace the window and put in that new door.  My son and I did demo for a bathroom.  I tore out some old garden stuff.  I tuned up the lawnmower and sharpened it and readied it for our first spring trim.  I even fixed the handle on our old red pickup, because, like Mt. Everest, it was there.

Like spring, Lent’s a spiritual fixit season for me, time for some self-work.  I study the Bible, pray, fast, and reflect.  I read a book.  This year, I’m in the Desert Fathers and Mothers.  I aspire, like Paul to “toil and struggle with all the energy that [Jesus] powerfully inspires in me” (Colossians 1:29).  That’s the idea, at least.  Accomplish some things around the soul.

But there’s a tension here, because life with Jesus is really all grace, God’s free gift (Ephesians 2:8-10).  He loved us first (1 John 4:9).  We were dead, and he made us alive (Romans 6:1-10).  

And yet, in the mystery of God’s love, there’s something to do: a response, an act of faith, a whole life that springs from the gospel.  The one who confesses and believes is saved (Romans 10:9).  Repent and be baptized (Acts 2:38).  Jesus said: Give, Pray, Fast (Matthew 6).  Lent’s a perfect time to activate faith working in love (Galatians 5:6).

Our conundrum comes because we class life into too-easy categories: work vs. rest, toil vs. play.  We’re either punching the clock, or we’re kicking up our feet.  But the paradox of the Gospel is this twofold truth: All is accomplished in Christ.  We have work to do.

You see this in the history of God’s people.  It’s God who lays the foundation (Psalm 127).  Yet you need a Zerubbabel and an Ezra and a Nehemiah.  The people have to have a mind to work (Nehemiah 4:6).  So too the church.  Jesus said, “It is finished” (John 17:4).  And then he sent the apostles out every which way to the build the kingdom at the farthest ends of the earth (Acts 1:8).

To follow Jesus is to learn a kind of unworking work.  Grace inspires labor.  Labor opens further grace.  Lent is the season of paying attention to the wherefore, what, and how this is true in Jesus.