Giving up

"What are you giving up?"

This is the question I've been hearing lately and it means that lent is almost here. Since Ash Wednesday is tomorrow, I've been thinking about it a lot. Drum roll please, because the answer is.... I still don't know.
I did not grow up in the church and did not come to my faith in Christ until later in life. As a result, I am a bit green about all the practices and disciplines of Christianity, though I am trying to make up for lost time. I did not know what Lent was at all until I attended college at a Catholic school and wondered why my fellow classmates had black ash on their foreheads, and did not begin trying to keep lent until a few years ago when it was introduced into the life of my church. I happen to attend a Baptist church, so its a bit new to them, too, but we are all learning together.


So, for those of you who may not know, Lent is a forty day season in the church year (excluding Sundays) that tends to be a time of reflection, moderation, repentance and spiritual discipline for Christians as we prepare for Easter. These forty days are an invitation to renewal. Lent is not simply a time to give up a vice or make a simple diet change but rather a call to preparation as we approach the celebration of resurrection. It is through this season we are called to truly experience what the human struggle is all about.

It is akin to the spring cleaning we all do each year - but its a spiritual spring cleaning.  Throughout the course of this season, you might consider spending time each day focusing on one or more of the following:


- Time of solitude or meditation each day

- Keep a journal reflecting on some of the things you are reading and learning

- Read a book for inner reflection and growth

- Focus on the other instead of the personal ask in prayer

- Make a list of people what you need to be reconciled with

- Forgive

- Let go of a grudge

- Say “no” to something that is a waste of money or time

- Find and be a voice for those that have no voice

- Love


Are you ready to enter into a season of renewal? What are the next steps for you as you ponder the lenten journey?

Little things

"Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things."

Here is the last picture I have of my mom holding my son before she died.  You can't see her, because she did not want to be in photographs anymore at this point.  I didn't know then that this would be the last picture.  Just a quick shot of her holding my wiggly little three month old.  I'm glad I took it, because looking back, this little thing was actually a big one.

A beautiful mess

"Men wrongly lament the flight of time, blaming it for being too swift; they do not perceive that its passage is sufficiently long, but a good memory, which nature has given to us, causes things long past to seem present." Leonardo Da Vinci, Thoughts on Art and Life

At the nudging of my husband, I finally cleaned out the top drawer of my desk.  This desk drawer has served no useful purpose for me in its lifetime.  I usually don't need more than my mouse, some stamps and an ink pen to get through my day, thanks to my heavy use of technology and conversion to a "paperless" office.

However functionally obsolete, the desk drawer remains.

And it has remained a repository of all things golden, all things important and meaningful to me.  Find something and not sure what to do with it?  To the depths of the desk drawer it goes, never to be seen or heard from again.  In fact, I have not even opened the darn thing since two moves ago, when I thoughtlessly slid everything that was on top of my desk into it with one quick motion as the movers made their way up my front walk to ring the bell.

I unearthed the mess today.  Its quite the find.  There it is, in the 15 by 12 inch shallow box - my life.  My memories, my most exquisite joys, my heart and my fears and my travels and my deepest sorrows - all right down there in that drawer that sits ever-so-quietly beneath me each day.  These are things that cannot be organized in any understandable form or fashion - pieces of my past, some things so old I can't recall their exact importance any longer.

This is what I imagine the picture must be inside my head on any given day.  Something like tracing your fingertips along the edge of embroidery.  The physical manifestation of all my hopes, my thoughts and my dreams in all those fleeting moments of life.

The drawer is finally empty - but my mind is now full - busy wandering the landscape of a life so very different just a few short years ago.