Lent is a Marathon, not a Sprint

Lent is a marathon. I think that we often get to third week or so and start to recognize that it’s a marathon, but that we approached it from the beginning as if it were a sprint. We set lofty goals, and we went after them with great ardor. And now, we’re spent. Our resolutions are looking a little rough around the edges. We’re discouraged because we’re not making the spiritual progress we’d hoped to make, but the calendar is marching onward towards Easter. 

The battle for Lent is being waged in our heads—that’s where most marathons are finished, or not. In an effort throw off the trappings of the world and to put on the love of Christ, we have to be transformed by the renewal of our minds (Romans 12:2). Renewal is an ongoing, lifelong process. God wants us to be transformed by the renewal of our minds so that we know and act upon His will for our lives. Did your “Lent list” look like a to-do and “to-don’t” list? It’s helpful to stop now, at roughly the midpoint, and remind ourselves that Lent is not about the checklist. The checklist is the training plan for the marathon. Lent is about transformation. It’s about transfiguration. It’s about becoming more and more like Christ. It’s about uniting our hearts and souls with Him in order to shine like the sun in the kingdom of our Father (Matthew 13:43).

We resolved to get up earlier to do some spiritual reading every day. But around the end of the second week of Lent, winter returned with a vengeance and we stayed under the covers first one day, and then the next. Four days later, we’ve given up on our “something extra” because now it’s a lost cause.

No it’s not! You lost four training days. That’s not the end. Pick up where you left off.

The renewal of your mind is a lifelong process; you will keep renewing until you breathe your last breath. Every day, we have the opportunity to begin again. Every day, we are given the opportunity to ask for the fruits of the spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control—in order to help us finish the marathon. Think of them as the Gatorade stations along the way. Replenish. Refill. Begin again. Ask Him.

The point of the marathon isn’t to collect the medal at the end, to check the distance off on your daily running calendar (though that no doubt would be very satisfying). The point is to become a runner. The point isn’t to become a Lenten ninja, able to leap out of bed in the still dark morning in a single bound. The point is to become more like God. Learning to leap out of bed is the means to making your heart more like His.

And it requires His help.

Struggling with Lenten discipline isn’t failure. It’s opportunity. Every time we struggle,we get to ask for fruits of the spirit. Every time we ask, and He answers, we see the boundlessgenerosity of God. And every time we take the fruits and use them for His glory, we are a few steps further in the marathon of our lives.

What to Give Up

A few days before Lent began, my friend Helen posted a quote that struck and stuck as I was pondering the whole “what to do, what to give up” question. On a stark black background, with no pretty picture or accompanying caption, I read, “Hold loosely to the things of this life so that if God requires them of you, it will be easy to let them go.”

Helen’s life is a testimony to this idea. Several years ago, she and her husband and their big bunch of kids moved from a comfortable home near extended family in upstate New York to rural Florida. There, they began homesteading and built a small farm. They also welcomed more children, including one they adopted out of foster care. By all accounts and appearances, they were living a life committed to faith, family and fellowship with their neighbors.

Then, it all shifted dramatically.

Helen and her husband announced that they were selling the farm and moving to a third-world country to spread the Gospel. I can’t tell you where they went because I don’t know. Helen can’t tell me because they are in mortal danger there. Helen is not even her real name. To be a Christian where they are is punishable by death.

I am ashamed to admit that I watched their plans unfold with not a little doubt. I saw them sell or give away everything that wouldn’t fit in one suitcase per family member. All the farm animals, the furnishings, the house and the land itself. Then came the real sticking point for me.

They said goodbye to her elderly father, not knowing if he’d still be alive when they return. They said goodbye to their adult children. They said a tender goodbye to a newly married son, his wife, and their first grandchild due to be born when they are so very far away.

I thought about how much I’ve whined because my kids are scattered across the country. I thought about a house I miss even as I love the one I’m in. I thought about how I am still so dismayed at the complete absence of adoration chapels in Connecticut when there is one in every town in Northern Virginia.

And now, I cannot stop thinking about that quote.

We hold so tightly. Sure, it’s easy to see how we might hold tightly to material things and creature comforts. It’s easy to see how we don’t want to let go of a favorite piano or a set of heirloom china. Or the house where all your babies grew.

But what about those other “things?” The things that aren’t things at all? It was Corrie ten Boom who uttered the words in that quote. It was a theme she often repeated during personal speaking engagements long after her extraordinary ordeal as a Christian who hid Jews during World War II and later survived a concentration camp. She made sure that people understood she wasn’t only talking about material things. “Even your dear family. Why? Because the Father may wish to take one of them back to himself, and when he does, it will hurt you if he must pry your fingers loose.”

We believe that God is God of all. Everything, but also everyone. As parents, we commit our lives to the well-being of our children. We encourage attachment because we know that it is healthy — both physically and emotionally — to be attached. But we have to hold loosely in order to trust Our Lord completely. We cannot grip anything so tightly that there is no room for the Holy Spirit. The truth is that God is sovereign. He is Lord of all; he already holds all our possessions and all the people we love. He asks us to know this and to willfully surrender them to him.

What to give up for Lent?

Everything.

Finding Silence

Right now is the perfect time for “pre-Lent” — a short period of time before Ash Wednesday when we have the opportunity to prepare our hearts and our environments for Lent. The time is now to prayerfully consider how God is calling you to renew your heart, transform your mind and reform your actions in order to rediscover (or truly discover for the first time) the mystery of our risen Lord.

In order to do this important work, find some silence. In that silence, determine how to create more silence. Lent should be quiet. In order to enter into the desert of Lent, we need both interior and exterior silence. Since we live in such a very noisy world, it’s going to take some time and effort to establish silence in our lives. We need to consider carefully how to distance ourselves from the distractions that fill life with so much noise that we can’t hear Our Lord and so much stuff that we can’t see him. Our world is not conducive to quiet recollection, so if we want to pursue it for Lent (and we do), we all need to be intentional.

Cardinal Robert Sarah’s powerful book, “The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise,” is a beautiful place to begin. Don’t wait until Lent; start reading now to craft a quiet, pondering place for yourself throughout the 40 desert days.

This quest for quiet is an urgent one if we are to notice and listen to God. Cardinal Sarah writes, “Without silence, God disappears in the noise. And this noise becomes all the more obsessive because God is absent. Unless the world rediscovers silence, it is lost. The earth then rushes into nothingness.” Noise begets more noise. God won’t compete with the noise. You won’t hear him over the din of daily life.

Consider all the ways you engage in noise. We live in a world of constant conversation. At the swipe of a finger, a myriad of voices comes alive in the palms of our hands. Looking for silence? Start there. Then, consider how our smartphone habits have created new circuits in our brains. We’ve trained ourselves to always be engaged in the noise of our world. Our brain is always busy. Cardinal Sarah poses an important question: “If our ‘interior cell phone’ is always busy because we are ‘having a conversation’ with other creatures, how can the Creator reach us, how can he ‘call us’?” For human beings accustomed to being perpetually available, it’s good to ponder if our souls are similarly accessible to God.

We need to wake up to the power of silence. Noise numbs us. More accurately, we numb ourselves with noise. We are constantly hearing something, but are we truly listening? Or are we barricading our souls with a wall of noise because we are uncomfortable in the quiet? Cardinal Sarah challenges us to think about the role incessant distractions play in our lives. “Noise is a deceptive, addictive and false tranquilizer. The tragedy of our world is never better summed up than in the fury of senseless noise that stubbornly hates silence. This age detests the things that silence brings us to: encounter, wonder and kneeling before God.”

What if this Lent is your time to encounter wonder? What if this is your season to kneel before God in silence and let him fill the void? What can you do right now to open yourself to that possibility?

Hope for what hurts

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” Matthew 5:4

It took three decades of the same argument over and over again (with different details each time) before I recognized the pattern. I’m not proud of this slow understanding, but I am encouraged by an intimate knowledge gained over time. It was so easy for me to see my husband’s pattern when we argue, to think I knew what his goals were every time, but it took a very long time to recognize what I wanted every time. Why did I keep repeating the same pattern of argument and what did that pattern have to teach me about myself?

We’ve worked hard to know what we do now. Since I’ve long subscribed to the idea that wives would do well to sing their husbands’ praises publicly and keep the rest to private conversation, we won’t talk about his arguing style; we’ll focus on mine. I am almost always seeking reassurance. I want to know he is a safe person, ours is a solid relationship, and we are a couple that is healthy and whole. During an argument, I almost always want to be comforted.

For me, to be in conflict is to mourn. Peter Kreeft writes, “Mourning is the expression of inner discontent, of the gap between desire and satisfaction, that is, of suffering.” When I open the definition of mourning to this interpretation, and I consider my intense need for reassurance, I see what Christ intended when he promised that those who mourn will be comforted.

He promised reassurance. He is the reassurance. He is the deep certainty, the safest of safe people, the most solid of all relationships, the truest expression of wholeness. The Father sent his Son into our suffering — all of our suffering — in order to satisfy our deepest needs for intimacy, understanding and reassurance. He promised that our suffering has redemptive value.

Jesus is with us when we weep. He’s there when we mourn in the most conventional use of the word, but he’s also there in the many struggles of our everyday lives. Certainly, he is also there when it all becomes too much to bear and we despair. Jesus came to earth to sit with us as we open a bill for which there are no resources, as we answer a call that brings terrible news, as we lie seemingly alone on a medical gurney. God knows what it feels like to be rejected, to be betrayed. He knows the grief of broken relationships and prodigal children. Knowing all, he entered in. Every pain we suffer, he suffers too.

He was wounded when he walked the earth, and we wound him even now. But he doesn’t turn away. Though we cause him pain, he stays. He reassures. His presence comforts us in a way nothing or no one on earth can. Even more astounding, he endures our sins. He is steadfast when we are not. We turn away from him over and over again, with every sin, big and small, and he stays.

Emmanuel. God with us.

The redeemer of our suffering comforts us in the sorrow. When life is crushingly hard, it is the Jesus of the scourging who absorbs the blows for us. He pours himself into us and we are strengthened. With that strength born of suffering, we have strength to offer others. He is risen and we are his body here on earth, blessed and broken for others. So, we stay. We enter into the sorrow. We offer ourselves.

We reassure a hurting world that there is hope.

His name is Jesus.

When we reframe the stress response

The last few months have been objectively stressful. There were unexpected trips away from home to provide necessary care to grown children who were sick and needed someone “on the ground” with them — my husband and me together, and then tag-teaming it, trading off so that one of us was at home and one of us was away for more than a month.

To that, there are massive changes in his workplace, very public layoffs that are staged to happen in waves over the course of the spring. There is the bewilderment and the deep grief that comes from the loss of a corollary relationship that came with my dad’s death, and the sorrow that he still hasn’t been buried and there’s nothing I can do about it. And then there are the “things that used to be big things, but make us shrug and sigh and say ‘of course’ now”: The dryer is broken; there are conflicts on the calendar between events we need to attend in other states and events we need to attend at home; the car is making noises as I coax it along the 400-mile trip to Virginia again.

I am a certified health coach. I’m a Catholic mindset coach. I know stress when I see it, and I know the sage advice is that something has to change. Prolonged periods of intense stress are detrimental to one’s health. The familiar advice is that stress is bad and we need to stop being so stressed.

The reality is that stress is life. And the measure of stress in any one life at any one time is not entirely within our control. Ironically, to the stresses of each of our lives we add another stress: Studies show that stress takes years — even decades — off your life.

To some degree, I believe that. I have seen stress turn someone’s hair entirely gray in a matter of weeks. I’ve seen stress put 60 pounds on a person’s body almost overnight. I’ve witnessed what stress can do to blood sugar and blood pressure levels. We are wired to have physical responses to stress.

But what if stress isn’t the bug that causes a system malfunction, but a built-in feature that can be utilized to enhance performance and improve the way we live life? What we think about the stressor will determine how we feel about the stressor. How we feel about the stressor will determine what we do about the stressor, consciously and also — to some degree — unconsciously. When we feel our breath come heavier and our hearts beat faster in response to stressful stimuli, we can choose to react with more fear or we can recognize that our bodies are now providing more oxygen and more awareness. When we reframe the stress response and see it as a system feature that is helpful to enhance performance, we can be less anxious and more confident. Further, our bodies will respond the way our minds direct them to. When you think about stress differently, your body can read that stress response — butterflies in your stomach, increased heart rate, shaky breath — more like it does when you’re falling in love than it does when you’re falling apart.

We don’t need to eradicate stressors — which is good because life has a way of throwing them at us. We do need to learn to change the way we think about stressors and about our physiological response to stress.

What is necessary is simple: surrender. Recognize that undesirable events and emotions are part and parcel of life. Recognize that feeling this flood of “stress energy” in response to those events is part of being a human being. It’s normal and it’s how we were created to respond.

Ironically, research shows that people with more anxiety perform better than people with no anxiety. Anxiety is going to provide you with some energy to meet the challenge at hand. And that can drive you into a peak performance mode. Embrace it in the moment; see it as a gift hard-wired into your person by your Creator. When you see the physiological response that way, it helps you to also see the stressor differently.

God allows challenges in our lives. He allows hard things to happen. And what he desires from us relative to those hard things is also surrender. The reality is we have very little control over what happens in our personal lives or what is going on out there in the world. It’s the same powerlessness as we have over the surge of hormones when we are afraid. And we can invoke the same surrender response.

In that moment of overwhelming stress, we can recognize what is happening and recognize the power we do have and the power we don’t have. We can ask the Holy Spirit to help us to discern what matters most and to use the energy we feel to think the thoughts that drive the actions that are consistent with God’s will. Surrender means trusting God’s design, and then giving the full assent of our will to him so that he can work in us and through us to bring about his perfect plan. Fair warning here notes that his plan might look nothing like yours. And you have to be good with that.

The last three years have taught me that right on the heels of a basement flood that wipes out almost every family heirloom will come a totaled car and then there will be emergency eye surgery and then there will be a grief so deep and sorrowful it will never find its way onto these pages. Stress happens. I know that.

But when it’s urgent and incessant and unrelenting, what if I could see that God is calling me to himself urgently, incessantly, unrelentingly? That he is ready and willing to stand shoulder to shoulder with me, to show me how to harness the energy of my body’s response and to labor alongside me? And once we’ve navigated the hard things yet again, what if he is eager and willing and waiting to show me how sweet the moment of true rest is in his presence, knowing that he can and will work it all together for the good?