By the Rev. Janna Ziegler

I always pack at the last minute. I forget to bring snacks to the park for my kids. I’m finishing this blog past the deadline in between tutoring kids in Chemistry. Needless to say, I’m not very good at getting ready—at preparation. To be fair, I have some good excuses, two children under two, a church plant, and a million other things pulling me different directions. But the reality is that I’m not a planner and as such Lent is a season that is foreign to my nature—a season of preparation. Each Lenten season, I find myself in an unfamiliar space that invites me to pause, to prepare, to get ready.

The primary mode of preparation during Lent is repentance. The beauty of this kind of preparation is that it invites us into deep honesty—honesty about ourselves, about the way we live in the world, about the way we treat our neighbors. In repentance we remember that we are dust, we rest in something that is true about us, we lean into our smallness and fragility. We put a pause to all the noise that tells us we have it all together, that tempts us to manage our image. We remember that we are finite. We remember that we have come from the dust and to the dust we will return.

It is in repentance, in honesty, that we gain perspective. Only in recognizing our smallness can we come to understand what it means when the Psalmist tells us that “the Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast, constant love. He does not deal with us according to our smallness and brokenness. His love towards us expands beyond the cosmos. He does not repay us according to our selfishness and greed.  He is compassionate towards us like a good parent. For he knows how we were made; he remembers that we are dust.”

[1] God knows that we are small and broken and He remembers that we are dust, and in that truth he extends to us mercy and steadfast love. Even when we do not remember and when we are blinded by our perceived grandiosity, God knows how we were made and extends unending mercy to those who sincerely repent.

For those of us who are not the best at planning, the season of Lent invites us to set aside the time and space necessary to remember our own mortality and fragility so that we are able to recognize our need for resurrection Life. Let us then repent of the ways in which we have failed to respond to God’s love and failed to love our neighbor, and believe the reality that Christ took on your shame and brokenness in exchange for new life.

The Rev. Janna Ziegler is the co-pastor of Gold Line Church in Highland Park. 

 

[1] Psalm 51, paraphrased.