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3/2/22 Ash Wednesday: The Journey Begins Glenda Simpkins Hoffman
My family is planning a few trips in the coming months. It’s both exciting and a little intimidating at the same time as we haven’t traveled together for three years. That’s why I took the time to watch a video webinar by Rick Steves on Why We Travel.
Rick shares his experience, passion, and reasons for traveling. He begins, “Traveling is leaving home, leaving the familiar behind. Why do we do this? Simply to have fun, to be amazed, to learn, to become students of the world, and for some, like pilgrims, to search for meaning…. We travel to understand, to search for meaning and find transformational value in what we see and experience.”
As I listened to him, I was encouraged and motivated to get ready to leave home to travel elsewhere. I also thought of the season of Lent, a 40-day journey that begins today on Ash Wednesday. Lent is a season set aside in the church calendar year to renew our intention to follow Jesus as we journey with him to the cross and the resurrection.
There is no right or wrong way to journey through Lent. Some may choose to do nothing different, and that is perfectly okay. But for others, including me, it is a way of embarking on a 40-day journey that does not involve a change of place but a change of pace with new or different practices and rhythms. We choose to leave the familiarity of our life routine to travel differently in a way that opens us to learn, understand, become, and find deeper meaning.
What does that look like? We may choose to fast from things like food, TV, social media, or other activities to make room in our lives for other things—time with God, as we read his word and talk with him in prayer, and time with people, connecting with old friends we haven’t seen for a while or getting acquainted with new friends. You may want to consider participating in one of the seven-week small group studies called The Lent Experience that will begin next week. Learn more and sign up here. Or perhaps you want to step out of your comfort zone to serve in missions.
The next 40 days will come and go, and each of us will get through them one way or another. But what I know from experience is that these 40 days can be a life-changing journey if we want it to be. I will talk more about that tonight at our 7:00 p.m. Ash Wednesday worship service. I hope you will join us in person or online.
For now, I will leave you with these wonderful words from Frederick Buechner that encourage and challenge me each year as I begin Lent:
“In many cultures there is an ancient custom of giving a tenth of each year’s income to some holy use. For Christians, to observe the forty days of Lent is to do the same thing with roughly a tenth of each year’s days. After being baptized by John in the river Jordan, Jesus went off alone into the wilderness, where he spent forty days asking himself the question what it meant to be Jesus. During Lent, Christians are supposed to ask one way or another what it means to be themselves.
“If you had to bet everything you have on whether there is a God or whether there isn’t, which side would get your money and why?
“When you look at your face in the mirror, what do you see in it that you most like and what do you see in it that you most deplore?
“If you had only one last message to leave to the handful of people who are most important to you, what would it be in twenty-five words or less?
“Of all the things you have done in your life, which is the one you would most like to undo? Which is the one that makes you happiest to remember?
“Is there any person in the world or any cause that, if circumstances called for it, you would be willing to die for?
“If this were the last day of your life, what would you do with it?
“To hear yourself try to answer questions like these is to begin to hear something not only of who you are, but of both what you are becoming and what you are failing to become. It can be a pretty depressing business all in all, but if sackcloth and ashes are at the start of it, something like Easter may be at the end.”
~originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words
http://www.frederickbuechner.com/quote-of-the-day/2016/7/6/lent
