Lent

Many churches  around the world celebrate the beginning of a new time in their calendar in terms of liturgy and events: the beginning of Lent.

With Ash Wednesday, Lent is inaugurated. While Easter celebrates the passion, death, and resurrection of Christ, Lent celebrates the 40 days when Jesus wandered in the desert prior to his ministry.

Three big words come into place at Lent: fast, prayer, and alms-giving.  All of them are biblical words highly connected both in Scripture, and in meaning. The way I see it is as follows:

Fasting: often understood from food (abstain from eating). In a general way, fasting is preventing oneself from that particular thing that takes  most of our time and effort, and that pulls us away from God. In my life, I have fasted from all these false idols I have had such as Facebook, chocolate, playing video-games, etc.  I felt I needed these things… even more than I needed Jesus; hence my fasting from them.

Prayer: Preventing oneself from what takes away most of our time (like watching television, for example) provides  us with more time to focus on prayer, in which God can reveal during this special time wonderful insights to our daily grind. I can say that, though it brings closeness to God, praying about our flaws takes a lifetime, not just 40 days.

Alms-giving: Again, in a much wider interpretation of the word, I see it as giving to the needed from what you have , i.e. some money, or some time, or some knowledge from what you’re learning, etc. I once used Lent to give time: talking to my grandma as a result from not playing video-games. It was such a brilliant time that I still carry to this day.

So in a way, fasting gives us the room to pray, and prayer leads us to give ourselves to others… just like Jesus.

My heart aches when I see what happens before and after Lent. A wonderful Baptist mother once told me ” Carnival’s motto is: sin as much as you can because you will have to repent at Lent”. That’s pretty much what happens before Lent, we pay extra effort on sinning, as if we didn’t sin without trying already. Then, Easter comes,and  “Yay!! We don’t have to fast anymore!!”. We go back to where we were before Lent. I certainly have done this and I often wondered what was the fasting for, then. A good Lent is the one that really challenges your life to be more like Jesus and not a suffering time for the sake of suffering.

If one’s rationale for contemplating Lent is to be sad, to beat oneself up, or to suffer because they deserve it, then Lent is not worthy. Lent is an inner desire of self-examination to be more like Jesus and remove those things that stand in between us and Him. Lent should be the time-out in the mist of our daily chaos, not because of obligation, but because we want to be constantly renewed by the Holy Spirit.

My prayer for you is that if you contemplate Lent, you do it for the right reason, and that this time may be so fruitful that it changes your life completely so that when Easter comes you know how much Jesus died for.

Abba‘s Kid