Moving through Lent can be a brutally honest journey, a journey for looking deeply within ourselves and trying to make peace with what we find there. More honesty can bring more contrition. If we are wise, we will not allow ourselves to trudge through guilt and self-recrimination. Instead, we will open our hearts and souls to transformation.
Still, Lent can be a season of wilderness filled with confusion. It is meant to be a journey of personal lament as we look straight into our hearts, which the place where transformation happens and resurrection is possible.
I was brought to tears a few nights ago as I read a Lenten meditation written by my friend, Ken Sehested. I share with you just a brief section of Ken’s meditation.
Lent is the liturgical season where this confusion rises to the surface, and we—especially people of privilege—are asked to enter the wilderness from which God, apparently, has absconded: where things don’t work out, where movies lack happy endings, where the faces of children are not cherry-cheeked, downy-soft, delightfully radiant.
Lent is the season when “Moonlight” upstages “La La Land.”
Lent beckons us into the wilderness, and there – through honest reflection and genuine repentance – we find transformation.
Read Ken Sehested’s excellent meditation, Lent is the season when “Moonlight” upstages “La La Land,” at this link:
http://www.prayerandpolitiks.org/articles-essays-sermons/2017/02/28/lent-is-the-season-when-moonlight-upstages-la-la-land.2487935
God of the Sparrow 🌱 By Kathy Manis Findley 