My Lenten Journey (or lack thereof)

I feel like I’m not really observing Lent.

I apologize if this sounds irreverent to anyone reading, but I think for at least half the Lenten season I’ve forgotten it’s Lent, but I was soon reminded of it when I literally got a rude awakening last Saturday morning when two Jehovah’s Witnesses knocked on my door handing me a flyer. I actually thought they were Christians at first, but then I looked at the flyer which read something like this: “Jesus- The Greatest Man that Ever Lived. Join us as we discuss questions such as Who is this Jesus?, What did he do for us?...” Then at the bottom I notice that the meeting is at Kingdom Hall in Costa Mesa…. I throw it away and crawl back into bed.

I don’t have any profound epiphanies to share during this Lenten Journey so far. In fact, I hardly feel like I’m really on a ‘Lenten Journey’ at all. I’ve been disobedient, indulgent, self-focused and I still feel like I’m on this journey of darkness in my life. As much as I hoped and thought that I was being led out of it, I feel like I keep getting sucked into the darkness. Just when I thought things could not be any worse, what do you know? I honestly did not know whether to laugh or cry. I asked God, “Are you kidding me? How much more of this can I take?”

I think I resonate with Becky’s sentiments in her last post in secretly finding joy in recounting how much pain I’ve been through. It's so much easier to whine and wallow in the pain instead of letting God bring you out of it. Maybe in some ways I am the one holding myself back from being at a better place.

Someone prayed for me once when I was really low. She said that she saw an image of me drowning in quicksand. At the time, I interpreted that quicksand to be external forces such as other people and other things out of my control. But I realized later that it was my own pain that I was drowning in, and I did have control of how far I wanted to sink into it. It’s not easy to get out (I’ve never actually been in quicksand but I imagine it isn’t an easy thing to pull yourself out of)… but not impossible either.

I think through the bad and the ugly though, God has shown me something good. I think as God brings up the difficult situations, I have learned how to respond. It is through this process that God is able to show me that He has brought me much further from where I was before, that in the face of some of life’s ridiculous moments, I can see them for just that and not as an excuse to jump back into that quicksand of pain.