The world seems like it’s on fire.
As I write my extended family is mourning the untimely death of a son, husband, father, and brother.
Ukraine is valiantly trying to bear up under the yoke of Russian aggression.
The United States has suffered another State of the Union address–the ultimate in artificial celebrations.
This all seems grim.
It is grim.
It seems like the 80s all over again.
Then comes Lent.
In a fit of contrariness I recently told my wife, “I’m so over lent.”
I’m not. I need it.
We need it. More than ever.
We have yet another opportunity to enter into Lent in the full knowledge of our own brokenness.
We have the gift of forty days to look beyond the mess. To take our eyes ever so slightly off of the death, destruction, decay, and depression, and broaden our focus.
We have the chance to see that there is something bigger, deeper, wider at play here than our own mess. God is at work bringing a new world, a new people, and a new reality into being.
It’s already here. But not in its fullness.
And we find it so easy to lose the glimpses of it that we see. Lent lets us reframe and refocus. It lets us focus on Christ–God with us.
Jeff Gissing 