Lent

The season of Lent is rapidly coming upon us! We all love attending our Shrove Tuesday Pancake Dinner presented by our youth group. It is a time of good food, fellowship and general goofiness with the pancake races. This meal reflects an old English tradition of using up various kitchen products in preparation for the customary Lenten fast. It was seen much like Mardi Gras as a demarcation point between the seasons of Epiphany and Lent.

While it is exactly that, I think many people have an unnecessarily negative view of the season of the church year. Lent does not have to be a trial. It should be a joy. I do not recommend Lent to be a time of radical and wrenching changes to one’s life. We all need to have an ongoing repentance but it is a little odd to see this in negative terms. As Christians we do need to make amendment for the wrongs we have done but this is not onerous to us because we know the Good News. Jesus Christ has atoned for our sins when we confess them. His saving action allows God to see us not as we are in our sinfulness, rather, when we repent, God sees us as God sees Jesus Christ. Our ongoing life as Christians is a journey sharing in the hope that is within us. In this journey, we are on a path to God the Father. Jesus travels with us, as does the Holy Spirit. When we actively call upon the Holy Spirit to assist us our path of sanctification is made easier by the power of God enabling us to live more and more into the life that God has called us. We actually begin to live in heaven now and not at some future time.

So Lent can be a time of joy. It can be joyful when we succeed in living into heaven now by cooperating with the Holy Spirit. But looked upon properly, it can be joy as well even as we repent for our daily errors knowing that God loves us and forgives us as long as we continue diligently on the path set before us in our journey with Jesus Christ and through the influence of the Holy Spirit. Happy Lent!