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Community Corner

Lent Offers Chance for Spiritual Spring Cleaning

This time of year is a good opportunity to step back, cut back and throw back the junk in our lives.

In light of the this week, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about secularized holidays and their historic roots in Christianity. Lent, which is an Anglo-Saxon word for "spring," is the 40-day period of preparation (not counting Sundays) that begins with Ash Wednesday (March 9 this year) and ends with a celebration of new life and spiritual rebirth on Easter morning (April 24 this year).

Originally, the church used these weeks to promote a "less is more" philosophy. Ideally, Christians would spend six weeks emptying themselves of the things of the world and filling themselves with the spirit of God through fasting, prayer and works of service. Ideally, hearts and minds would be permanently transformed during the process, the soul better reflecting the image of God come Easter morning.

People being people, though, we've always had a difficult time letting go of the ways of the world. From the first encounter in the Garden of Eden with that slippery serpent, the human desire for living large has frequently outweighed our desire to follow God.

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In the fifth century, when Pope Gelasius outlawed the wild and wanton early spring pagan festival of Lupercalia, Mardi Gras became its Christian equivalent, an all-out party day before the stringent, somber rituals of Lent began. But one day was not enough for mere mortals, and eventually Carnival emerged as a six- to eight-week period of living large from Epiphany (January 6) to Mardi Gras (March 8 this year).

Flash forward a thousand years to the 21st century. Growing up as a kid in the Protestant church, “giving something up for Lent” was what my Catholic (and sometimes Lutheran) friends did. Generally speaking, we Protestants felt sorry for them. No candy. No French fries. No donuts. No pop. For six whole weeks. Oh, the agony. It just wasn’t right. And when their resolve crumbled, we nodded our heads in understanding and passed the potato chips.

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Now at my church during Lent, we put money into a little cardboard box for One Great Hour of Sharing. The money got sent off to the starving and sick children in India or Africa, whose pictures (I think the same pictures) covered the box every year. Surely this was a better option than giving up chocolate for six weeks, wasn’t it?

However, lost in translation over the centuries of human desire, was the goal of connecting people—mind, body and spirit—back to God during this time of stepping back and cutting back. While the adults at my church (and my friends’ churches) most likely had a more evolved understanding of Lent, I’m not sure that message ever got fully communicated to me. One Great Hour of Sharing was a given, yet what was I really giving? With no real impact on or connection to anything else we did at church the rest of the year, how did I grow closer to God during Lent? I don’t think I did.

And there’s the real problem: We might laugh or gasp in shock at the hoarders we see on TV, but aren't we all hoarders, hanging on to all the junk we’ve collected from living in this world? And I’m not just talking about physical possessions. I’m talking about envy, pride, laziness, greed, anger, overindulgence, unrestrained desires, the stuff that transforms our hearts and minds to focus solely on what we need and not what God needs from us.

So I’m thinking the time is right for a little spiritual spring cleaning. Just because I love and serve God doesn’t mean I don’t fill up my soul with worldly junk. It’s a constant struggle to let go of that stuff and hang onto God. Lent is the perfect opportunity to take a step back, reexamine my priorities and get rid of the clutter that prevents God from moving freely in my life. My prayer is that you would be able to do the same, as well. Amen. Let it be.

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