Lent: Where This Time is Taking Me
We are nearing the homestretch of Lent. This has been a significant journey. Forty days - it isn’t exactly eternal, but in our instant society, forty days of anything tests our will and discipline. Really, for me, I think Lent simply tests our attention. Can I pay attention to God’s ongoing work for a stretch […]
Lent: Lenten Zerberts
To look at the last great self-portraits of Rembrandt or to read Pascal or hear Bach’s B-minor Mass is to know beyond the need for further evidence that if God is anywhere, he is with them, as he is also with the man behind the meat counter, the woman who scrubs floors at Roosevelt Memorial, […]
Lent: And the Frogs Will Sing Again
There are two nights in farm life that matter the most every year: the night the frogs begin to croak and the night when the fireflies begin to mate, lighting the whole of our fields with thousands of frantically blinking lights bent on attracting one another into a reproductive orgy. The fireflies dance, usually in […]
Lent: An Awakened Imagination
The brain is the organ of truth; imagination the organ of reality. {Clyde Kilby}
Many Christian disciplines - and Lent is no different - suffer from a debilitating reputation: that they are activities encouraging us to withdraw from the reality around us, ways of hiding out from the physical, lived-in world. For many of us, prayer […]
Lent: Mighty to Save
Well, Lent is here, for sure. Almost on cue, this past week, the hammer dropped. I’ve experienced spiritual dearth, oppressiveness, shame, fear, loneliness. In the words of my new friend Kade, “this kind of [crap] gets old fast.” Amen, brother.
If you want another perspective on the state of things in my house this past weekend, […]
