Refresh and restart
It’s been nearly a week since we started all this.
With ashes smeared upon our foreheads, we committed ourselves to new disciplines. Our motives are good: we have dreams and desires to refresh our relationship with Jesus. We’re in the desert to detoxify and prepare for the joy of that great Sunday, the holy day of Easter.
We’re trying to let God have with us what God will. We have a long way to go to really be ready. Our trying turns into trials. Over and over we keep encountering an important Lenten truth: we’re really not that great.
That lack of greatness is an uncomfortable consciousness. For some of us, it’s much easier than others. Some people are incredibly disciplined and are used to working on getting better. Their life is structured around the flow of “yes to this,” and “no to that.” It amazes me.
For others like me, the attempts of taking on Lenten disciplines are simply an experience of knowing again and again how undisciplined I really am. I keep messing up and forgetting. I keep wondering if I need to pick a new focus–all my attempts are just making me feel awful about how terrible I am at being disciplined.
You see, one of my intentions is to simply take a 10-minute afternoon walk and focus only on the beauty of creation during that time. How’s this been going? Well, it hasn’t. It’s awful. I pile on excuses about why I can’t make that pause or just completely forget about it. Overall, I keep realizing how much I need Jesus; how much I am clueless and lost and nothing without him.
The thing about Lent is that it is indeed a time when we must pray, fast and give alms so we can be more open to hearing Jesus’ messages. To start, it’s much easier to listen to Jesus if we are aware of how much we need to listen. Maybe that’s the whole point. I need to be humble, weak and feel sort of pathetic. I have to let go of my pride to really be dependent on God. Then, maybe I’ll be much better at letting Jesus satisfy my thirst.
In the meantime, I am so thankful that in my trials of renewing my relationship with Jesus I have this time to refresh and this space to restart.
I just relish your insights because I am just plan lazy and get so upset worrying about thinks and worse of all I take pity on self. Indeed I am deplorable but still in my “dream Prayers at night I still and do want to….give life another try……and I do some time even with a smudge of success. I must get back down to river to pray nite all
this year lent is clicking for me. somehow the promises are taking root deeper than I expected and the shifts feel tangible. it feels like this yearly discipline is not just lip service…. and we are only week 1 so we shall see….
exactly what I needed to read tonight. thanks for posting.
I have failed to keep up with my Lenten resolutions, but I have not failed this Lent. I went into this Lent hoping to form a stronger relationship with Christ. So far I have, just not in the way I originally thought I would. I have actually come to a more clear realization about Jesus’ Passion and death as well. It was not the people of old who crucified him; it was not the Jews; it was not even “us” who did it as a whole. He died because of MY sins. I was the one who put Jesus on the Cross. And now this is the time for me to do my part so that one day I may be able to live eternally with Christ in heaven-
the whole reason He died for me.