Lent is a curious season.
A remembrance of the 40 days that Jesus spent fasting and praying in the wilderness, Lent is a passage to the celebration of Easter - one that invites us to a sort of voluntary emptiness. And though I know that sounds bad – who likes an empty plate, gas tank or heart? – one can also make the case that this is, in fact, just what we need from time to time.
No one could accuse us of being people of undivided attention, after all. (What would our grandparents say about us?) So many things clamor for our attention that at times we forget some of the obvious priorities or shunt them aside for lesser things. Perhaps that’s why Someone once said, “you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed; indeed, only one thing is necessary!” (Luke 10:41-42). By very old custom, the six weeks preceding Easter can serve as a time to take careful account: am I deepening in my relationship with God, growing in my ability to find joy in the life God gives? Do I have new, more authentic and loving relationships in my life? Or am I stressed, lonely or feeling scattered? How do I now make space for Jesus to share with me the “One Thing” I most need?
Questions like these make me wonder if it might just be time to start a fire again.
It’s an image that has stayed with me since our days serving in Virginia’s Southside, when we lived west of Danville on a busy, rural highway. One mid-winter day, I looked out to see with alarm that the tall, dry grass in the median was ablaze. Some careless motorist had tossed out a cigarette, perhaps. We called the local heroes of the Brosville VFD, and happily the flames did not escape the lane divider. But after the smoldering finally subsided, a jumbled field of refuse came into view: beer cans, soda bottles, car parts, scrap metal – even a large, brass nozzle from another local fire department! So, I traversed the traffic to glean two large trash bags-worth of all that roadside detritus. (I dutifully returned the fire equipment, of course.)
I scarcely noticed that median again until a morning in late March: alone among the miles and miles of unkempt lane dividers, ours came up early in a striking sea-green. By end-April, it was a verdant jungle out our window, swaying with the passage of transfer trucks. And for each of our remaining years there, that plain little space was always the better for that fire.
Not much of a story, but there it is: Lent is an invitation to start a little fire. Some of the things that creep into our lives at times have to be burned away to expose the unhealthy things, the ugly things that we let take up accidental residence there. But in doing so, we allow God to begin again in us some new growth, some deeply-rooted prospect that we can become more the people we were made to be. More fully ourselves.
And then everything else is just easier, motoring along our way, taking the One Thing with us as we move from one gracious gift to another (John 1:16).
A blessed season of Lent to you,
Pastor Dave
