Lent #1: I'm Not Ready

"Every time I read that story again,

I want to run and take the nails out..."

(Mark Nicks, "I'm Not Ready")

I've been a bit slow on the uptake with Lent this year. Perhaps it's just that Easter is very early this year and so I haven't been prepared for Lent to begin in February. Perhaps it's that my church does not pay any attention to these things (we still observe Easter, but Lent and Advent aren't usually big focuses; Pentecost, unsurprisingly, comes and goes unnoticed). But I suspect my mind has also just been in other places. And it's for this very reason that I like to observe Lent: not because the observation of it in any way contributes to my salvation, but because I can't expect that, on Good Friday, I'll be in the right headspace to remember what Jesus has done for me. That'll never happen. We're rarely ready even when we prepare our hearts; it's just too monumental a thing for the human mind to grapple with. Lent, at the very least, gives us 40 days to get the process going.

I see Lent more as a time of reflection than of fasting. Anything I give up, I do so to give myself more space in my thinking. One year I decided to only listen to worship music and hymns for the whole forty days; I didn't want anything other than God's truth to fill my head. It was a wonderfully edifying time. Still, when Easter Sunday came, I felt cold and spiritually dry. Thank God that our emotional state doesn't count for anything in our salvation. But the fact is that the forty days I'd spent focusing on God had still borne fruit; it just hadn't given me emotional elation on Easter Sunday. But is that really the point?

Now, I'd had grand plans for what to do this Lent. I'd enjoyed writing my Advent reflections so much that I was determined to do the same thing for Lent. In fact, I decided that I would write a reflection each day - forty reflections in total. That's obviously not going to happen. Ash Wednesday has been and gone; now it's Saturday. I'd have to write four reflections today just to catch up. I'm not sure if my "40 Poems for Lent" project will be any more successful, but at least I've got a head start on that one: I've already written four poems that could go towards it. Again, it's not the point. My unreadiness, my spiritual flabbiness, my lack of discipline: all these things are reasons why Lent should be a wonderful time of hope and promise for me. The disciples fell asleep in the garden while Jesus sweated blood, their very name "disciples" being an irony that night; and yet still His blood was shed to cleanse them. I am the same. I'm not ready for Lent this year, but that doesn't matter. Lent - the time of remembering Jesus' great love and mercy - is most certainly ready for me.