On giving up Lint for Lent…..

Grey clouds stuck together Fam.  Lightning piercing through another land.  Over the desert with the lost place, soul searching each and every way.   See the awesome sounds so profound when it..it will grip you.  If you can hear it you can feel it, too.  It is something special I am running to……….

“I gave up Lint for Lent!”  These are the words of my best bud Dave who, honestly, is one of the most thought provoking people that I have ever been around.  There is not doubt that he can give the funniest most challenging comments of anyone I know.

He said this, jokingly, during a conversation about what some of us gave up for lent.  Because, honestly, we Christians talk about what we gave up during lent all of the time.  But, is that what lent is about?  Is lent about giving things up like chocolate and facebook?  Why do we have this constant obsession with giving up things and talking about it?  What the hell is lent really about?????????

Let’s start with me…….because I’m bad at this lent game.

Last year I gave up two things.  I gave up my bed (so I slept on the floor) and I gave up meat (including seafood).  Wow…….wasn’t I a good lent giver-uper……..

Well, not exactly.  Here is my confession…..

I longed for people to ask me what I gave up.  Why?  Because I could tell them what I gave up.  Pathetic, eh?  Ya, tell me about it.  Well, as you can probably tell, that lent did not exactly teach me much.  So, maybe I learned some discipline, but in the big scheme of things lent was about me and how much better I was than everyone else.  This is not lent, this is arrogance at its finest.

I secretly wanted people to ask…..still gets me every time I think about it.

But, honestly this is what we are taught about lent. Lent is a time when I give up something so that I can defeat my wants. 

So, I have tried not to talk about lent this time.  Yes, I gave up something, but it is more about what new things I am seeing……

Because lent is more than just giving something up.  It is a time to see the world in a whole new way–a radical way that reveals God putting it back together in the midst of our brokeness.

Lent is about re ordering our lives around God, instead of ourselves.  It is not about giving up things so that we can feel good that we accomplished something.  It is about entering into God’s story so that we can see the wonderful, beautiful things that are happening.

If it is about us, we might as well just give up Lint for Lent.