Lent comes early this year, barreling at us when some of us are still struggling to figure out what year or month it is. On February 18 we will gather to remember our mortality which was, in my opinion, given to us a gift from our creator. Lent is a complicated season for me and I think for many other Jesus-seekers. It is a season meant to remind us of our reliance, our dependence on God, God’s grace, and God’s goodness; but often we use it as a time to focus on how we can make ourselves better individuals or how we have failed at being worthy of God’s love. We center ourselves in Lent— when Lent is a time to try to decenter ourselves and instead center on God.
Kate Bowler shared a conversation she had with Oliver Burkeman, whose work focuses on time, finitude, and productivity. Bowler writes: The fantasy is that one day, if we just get the systems right, life will finally calm down. That we’ll arrive at a version of ourselves who is organized enough, disciplined enough, healed enough to coast. But that day never comes. … As Oliver puts it, this is another way of denying death. We’re not exactly pretending we’ll live forever. We’re just acting like we can cram forever into right now.
On Ash Wednesday, we admit our mortality, the fact that we are formed from dust and to dust we will return… and then we commit ourselves to Lenten disciplines that are ways we can improve ourselves to cram forever into right now.
This is your invitation to do Lent differently this year. Let’s work together to center God in our Lenten journey and simply open ourselves up to see what transformation God works in our lives when given a little space and time.
Our Lenten theme is “The work of imagination.” We will be shown that Lent begins in the ache, the questions, the tension between love and loss. It does not rush toward resolution, but invites us to slow down, to turn with honesty, and to journey with Jesus through wildness, confrontation, and cross. Along the way, we listen to voices from the margins, learn from stories of resistance and renewal, and remember that God meets us not in strength, but in surrender. This is the work of imagination: to envision a world remade by mercy, to trust that healing is possible even in the shadow of empire, and to practice love that outlasts despair. Lent calls us into this holy labor—not as a solitary act, but as a communal path toward transformation.
One of the aspects about this program that I am most intrigued by is that it uses the word “wildness” to help us connect the wilderness of biblical times to the wildness of the world we live in today, encouraging us to look for connections between the wilderness that Jesus experienced and the wildness of our daily lives.
As we look toward beginning our annual Lenten journey in the middle of this month and you consider your Lenten disciplines, it is my prayer that these 40 some-odd days will be a time when you try out relying on God’s mercy and comfort, making space and time to simply allow God to remind you that you are God’s beloved child and that God has a dream for your life that fits in just right with God’s dream for the world God so loves. Imagine that!
