Tag: Lent

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Lent: A Love/Hate Relationship

By Amy Spiegel

Well, here we are again. Lent. As we slip through winter days of snow and ice, with Christmas decorations once again stored safely away, Lent has a way of sneaking up on me every year. When I think of Easter, I imagine shoeless kids running through sun-drenched yards getting grass stains on the knees of their Sunday best; the glow of new life springing up all around us. This, however, is not what I see when I look out the window today. It is grey. Grey sky. Grey snow. Everything is frozen, grey and dead. Or so it would seem. Lurking just beneath the surface, there is life, waiting, holding its breath, waiting.

It amazes me how finely tuned a world our Creator has made. I could watch nature shows for days on end, marveling at the complex web of interdependence which has been spun all around us. And in the season of Lent, this physical world mirrors the invisible yet tangible reality of our spiritual journey. These forty days of self-denying greyness are reflected in the greyness of winter’s dying breath. (Unless you live in some unnatural tropical paradise of course, which just means you aren’t as spiritual as the rest of us. We would move to Hawaii or California but then I don’t want to miss out on all those spiritual insights that snow, ice and frostbite bring.)

When I wake up to chilly floors and fingers that can never quite get warm, my heart whispers “Hold on. Spring is coming. Hold on. The sun is closer today than it was yesterday.” When I stare longingly at the empty places on my phone where for the next several weeks my Netflix and Amazon Video apps will not be, a voice says “Hold on. They will be back.” And yet all this longing and waiting points to a deeper anticipation of joy yet experienced, longing never fulfilled. For spring and summer will pass and bleed into fall and winter and once again we will miss the warmth and green the sun brings. But one day, the Son will return and bring with Him an everlasting life that will never turn cold.

So I will wait. Staring out my window at the grey, holding fast to the promise that it won’t last forever. I sit here wearing the sign of the cross on my forehead, appropriately, in ash grey. This cross is made from the ashes of last year’s palm branches, connecting Palm Sunday’s shouts of “Hosanna” to Good Friday’s cries of “Crucify him!” and looking forward to Easter’s “He is risen.” Like our Savior, today I wear a cross so that one day I can wear a crown.

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Celebrating Lent

By Amy Spiegel

Happy Fat Tuesday! (a.k.a. the day everyone in our house scrambles to come up with something to give up for Lent and then spends the day doing/eating/watching that thing as much as possible). It’s funny to see each of our personalities come out in how we go about this process. Jim? Knows himself and gives up the same thing nearly every year—sweets. The kids’ strategy? Try to think of something that will sound impressive to their friends but they won’t actually miss all that much (e.g, “Mom, can I give up brushing my teeth for Lent?”) I will give Sam credit for having given up sugary cereal a few year back, given that cereal is just below oxygen and water on his list of life’s necessities.

I usually start thinking about Lent well in advance of its arrival. I know I have found a winner when I think of something and then immediately panic. This, of course, is a good indicator that this is the very thing I should choose, but I will spend the next few weeks saying, “I am not really going to give up that, am I?” Then Lent rolls around and I spend the next 40 days saying, “Whose dumb idea was it to give this up? Oh, wait…it was mine.” This year? My beloved iPad in all it’s app glory will be hitting the shelf ‘til Easter morning at which point I will gorge myself on back episodes of Castle and Antiques Roadshow.

Recently I read a book about life in England during the year 1000, appropriately entitled The Year 1000. The book walks the reader through the calendar year and I found its discussion of Easter particularly fascinating. The people of this time “had encountered the reality of famine.” Their deep connection and dependence on the land made hunger an ever-present specter that haunted their lives. But during Lent, the author says, “Fasting was the church’s way of harnessing hunger to spiritual purposes…Occurring when it did, in the final months of winter when the barns and granaries were getting bare, there was a sense in which Lent made a virtue of necessity.”

I don’t know the physical hunger of my medieval brothers and sisters, but as I survey our country’s, and my own, moral landscape, I see a land plagued by drought and pestilence. I see a land of plenty starving for want of nourishment.

Ironically, in Lent, in this time of abstinence and voluntarily deprivation I find the very nourishment I need. Lent is the time to shake off the covers, take inventory and do some spring cleaning. In the absence of distraction, I feel the glow of God’s presence.

In that sense, Lent isn’t a time of fasting at all. It is an exchange of one food for another; the food which poisons and numbs for the food which nourishes and awakens. My heart’s barn is empty but God is ready and waiting to give me my fill. May you and I be prepared to work for and receive the harvest He has prepared.

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Something to Look Forward To

By Amy Spiegel

Sometimes I wonder if I have a secret power to influence the weather. Not control it outright, just give it a nudge or two in the general direction of my mood. I wake up feeling bright and sunny and low and behold, not a cloud in the sky. Or, like today, I wake up feeling burdened and gloomy and sure enough, it’s dreary and damp out. Of course, the more logical explanation is that I am influenced by the weather rather than the other way around. But today, it isn’t just the weather that has put me in a somber mood. With the scent of brownies and celebration still hanging in the air from last night’s “Fat Tuesday Feast”, I now am looking out at forty days of famine. Okay, not literal famine, but rather, beverage famine.

You see, each year about two or three weeks before Ash Wednesday, I search my heart and try to come up with the most challenging abstention I can think of. Looking past a mere enjoyment of chocolate and shoving aside an intervention-worthy caffeine addiction, I bravely choose something that makes me shiver with ascetic anticipation; something that would make the desert fathers nod in approval. It’s easy to do, of course, two weeks prior, but as Lent approaches, my heart begins to squirm a bit under the building pressure and the negotiations begin. The serpent of my undisciplined spirit begins whispering in my ear and my conviction wavers. “Perhaps a bit of modification is in order, just to guard against legalism, ya know.” Then the day arrives and it’s too late and so for the next forty days the grey clouds will hover as I do battle with my freakishly strong will.

Having done this for several years now, two things strike me as interesting bookends to the experience of Lent. The first is that no matter how much self-indulgence I practice the day before, it is never enough. I could stay up ’til midnight stuffing my face or watching film after film, and I would still wake up on Wednesday longing for just one more hit of chocolate or one more chick flick. I suppose it is a symptom of our fallen state that we are always wanting more and yet a remnant of our previous glory that even brownies, no matter how tasty or plentiful, aren’t what we are really longing for. Whenever I voluntarily relinquish something that I normally enjoy, I am confronted with the depth of greed and utter ingratitude. After all, I have only given up one thing and am left with a myriad of other choices. Yet the knowledge that there is one thing I can’t have irritates me to no end because I realize how childish it is. Recognizing my weak and petty nature, my only refuge must be at the feet of God’s mercy. So in the end, what should be a rather depressing realization of my shortcomings is transformed into an acknowledgment of His endless grace.

The other observation I have made about fasting, whether from a food or activity, is that the end never lives up to hype. Several years ago, I was expecting our daughter and had given up sweets for Lent. Maggie was born on Good Friday and my sister brought me a Tupperware container full of one of my favorite treats to celebrate with on Easter morning. I stared at that container day and night, only to forget to eat one come Sunday morning. When I finally did eat one, sure it was good (okay, really good), but like an itch that refuses to be scratched, it was not truly satisfying. Whatever it is I have given up, I am left saying “This is what I was longing for all this time?” What a happy thought it is to know that one day I will leave behind this world of half pleasures and live forever in complete contentment. What a mind-blowing thought to know that Jesus did the reverse, giving up all the delights of heaven to live and die and live again in order to bring us home. Now that is truly something to look forward to.

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A Lifetime of Lent

By Amy Spiegel

Approximately three days into the Lenten season this year, I began my sad dance with legalism. Like troops circling the enemy, I have poked around my commitment’s defenses to see where there might be a weak point. I have chosen to give up something somewhat vague for Lent and so there is a little wiggle room as to what qualifies as prohibited and what is permissible. I didn’t intentionally choose something ambiguous; I am actually much more of a black and white gal. In fact, I often feel that my Lenten “sacrifice” chooses me rather than the other way around. A few weeks before Ash Wednesday, I start taking stock of my crutches—those little luxuries that pop into my head at times of stress and seem to say “Don’t worry. I will make it all better.” It is terrifically pathetic how much comfort and satisfaction I can get from such a fleeting snack food or how inconsequential life’s problems become at the end of a good Masterpiece Theater presentation of Jane Austen and the like (and frankly it doesn’t even have to be that good). What is even more pathetic is how slow I am to consider going to our true source of comfort and satisfaction? Why would I want to pray or read the Bible when I can eat a Reese’s Cup or watch Persuasion for the hundredth time? Why cry out to the Lord of heaven and earth when you can tear into all that peanutty goodness hidden in a wondrous chocolate shell?

A few thoughts have struck me afresh this Eastertide as I have pondered the triviality of what I have sworn to forgo for the next 4 weeks (4 weeks and 2 days to be precise but who’s counting?…other than me, that is). One is the ridiculous amounts of freedom we are granted as Christians. Many, both inside and out of the church, would like to reduce our faith to a bunch of restrictive “dos” and “don’ts” to be obeyed. But my desire to wiggle out from underneath my self-imposed restrictions only goes to show how rebellious my heart truly is. I have a refrigerator full of food and drink that I am free to eat—surprised that I gave up something food related?—and yet all I can focus on are the things that I can’t have. My kids are often amazed, and not a little angry, at Adam and Eve’s choice to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil when they had all the other trees to pick from. And yet our ancestors’ attitude is reflected in our own ingratitude for our many blessings and that hankering we all feel for just a little of the grass on the other side of the fence. In Christ, we find true freedom and yet complain that becoming what we were created to be is too restrictive.

Along with pondering the insignificance of our sacrifices, I have been thunderstruck anew with the enormity of Christ’s sacrifice for our sake. Over the last week, I have been thinking about his life on earth and its implications. In thinking of Jesus’ life as a sort of 33-year Lent, his human experience has taken on a different meaning for me. I think I am self-disciplined indeed when I swear off Diet Coke for 40 days and yet Jesus left the banquet halls of heaven to eat among fishermen and carpenters. I complain when my knees feel a bit achy and yet the Son left a glorious existence to inhabit an earthly body that must have felt torturously confining and frail. Each day of His life was a fast from close fellowship with the Father and Spirit. The enduring of each insult or failure to show Him proper respect an act of humility that we cannot begin to comprehend. Of all the paradoxes of the Bible, this servant King must surely take the prize.

Now Christ is in heaven, receiving all the glory and honor that is due Him. And soon we here left behind will honor Him through the celebration of Easter. I hope, however, that I can find increasing freedom in obedience and that I can honor Him with my heart not just my actions. Too often I fear I care more about the outer trappings than the inner temple. Like a defective Reese’s Cup, I hide my hollow center with an attractive wrapper and chocolate shell. But I want to be the real thing and by God’s grace, someday I will be. Until then, I will keep plodding along in my own lifetime of Lent, awaiting my own day of resurrection Celebration.

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Declarations of Independence from the Self-checkout Lane

By Amy Spiegel

I have a new favorite grocery store experience. It used to be the video carts where for a dollar you can have a noise-free cruise through the aisles while your children slowly grow less intelligent watching mindless programming in the cart below. (I only did this once. Okay, twice but it was late at night and I was taking pity on the kids…and myself. And the second time doesn’t really count because Maggie kept a running commentary going on the show, poking her head out every few minutes to let me know what was happening now, thus negating the noise-free aspect.) But the video carts pale in comparison with my new passion for the self-checkout lane. 

There is something very existential about the process of ringing up your own groceries, while paid professionals laugh at your inability to get the bar code to scan. Does it get more American than this? We pay ridiculous amounts of money in order to “work” out, simulating actual physical labor rather than performing similar, calorie-burning tasks at home. We flock to restaurants serving “home-style” cooking rather than actually cooking at home. So why shouldn’t we pay for the privilege of figuring out how much money we owe the grocery store? Despite the obvious absurdity of the whole process, I can’t help myself. As soon as I begin to head for the front of the store, I hear that lane of self-determination calling my name, like the sirens calling Odysseus to his doom. I love escaping the judgment of some pimply faced high-schooler with regard to how many packages of Reese’s cups make their way into my cart. I love going at my own pace, organizing all my purchases by category without the weighty stare of the people behind me, urging me to mix my canned goods with my dairy. I love the feeling of accomplishment and independence the power of the self-checkout lane brings. 

And isn’t that the draw for us all? Why do we pay someone to torture us with free weights and cardio rather than pull weeds and chase our kids around the yard? Because the one we do by our own free-will and the other is compulsory. Why do we pay inflated prices for mediocre food when we could make something tastier, cheaper and healthier at home? Because eating out is a “privilege” and making dinner is a chore (and you don’t have to do the dishes, which is pretty big, but nevertheless). And why do I choose to add twenty minutes to my grocery shopping trip rather than have someone more qualified and efficient ring up and bag my groceries? Because I want to do it myself, thank you very much. 

It would be funny, if it weren’t so tragic. In our attempt to have everything on our own terms, the only person we really cheat is ourselves. I want to follow the example of Christ, living a life pleasing to God. So what do I do? In arrogance and pride, I pull myself up by my own spiritual boot-straps (which are neither sturdy nor dependable) and attempt it on my own. What I am called to is a life of submission and humility but somehow, my perverse human nature can even distort that into an unrecognizable life of self-reliance and failure. I think I am failing when I lack the fortitude to live up to His standards but in truth my failure came long before, in my lack of trust in the life, death and resurrection of my Savior. I want to gather my supplies, count the cost and pay what I owe when in fact, I don’t know what I need or how much it is worth or have anything worthy to give in return. So while this doesn’t mean I am giving up my independence with regards to grocery shopping, I am making an effort (through the grace of the Holy Spirit) to relax my hold on this stroll through the mall called life. It certainly seems appropriate to the season of Lent, when Jesus prepared to relax His hold on life itself for my sake and for yours. Who better to entrust ourselves to than the One who considered His duty a privilege and obedience an honor? Maybe we will find the same joy He found in the sorrow of humility.