Easter Season is here! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!
Easter came with all the glory expected. Every year it just seems more and more meaningful. But as I am slowly immersing into the season of abundant joy, I ask myself what to do with the season that is now behind us, namely Lent?
The 40 days of Lent a provided some genuine times of reflection, introspection, and renewal. The Season went by faster than I anticipated, but it left a profound mark in my life. There are five lessons I thought I’d share as I enter the Easter Season with a tremendous appetite to see Christ exalted in everything I do.
First, I learned that Lent is needed. We tend to think that we can meditate on everything without any order or sequence. We simply can’t. God loves time. He gave it to us. He knows we need to be structured as human beings, and He gave the Church wisdom to help us structure our meditations and concerns. To do so, He gave us Jesus. Jesus is with us all year long as we live, move, and have our being in Him through Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Easter, and Pentecost (Trinity). We need not just Christ, but His entire life lived, crucified, and raised. Consistent meditation on one theme over the others causes misdirection in affection and the Christian experience.
Second, I learned that Lent is for loving. We live for others. We live for the community. We follow the Head, and following Him means serving the body. Lent is for going the extra mile in service and charity.
Third, Lent is for dying. Life is structured as a death/resurrection pattern. We all enjoy the latter motif, but we find the dying part to be a bit outrageous. Perhaps our expectations need to be re-shaped. Lent is for dying to self. It’s for taking up the cross. It’s for weeping with those who weep. Lent is the realization that the joy of living is dying, so that others may live.
Fourth, Lent is imprecation. In Lent we learn that God has enemies. In Lent we pray that God would act justly upon those who humiliate, abuse, torture, and murder the innocent. I learned that imprecation is the most powerful response to such cowards. In Lent I learned that God’s justice is always perfect and His acts always timely.
Finally, during Lent I learned that I do not love the cross as I ought. I learned that crucifixion and death are still too foreign to my way of thinking. I learned that the death of Jesus continues to have serious consequences for the way I live my life.
Through Lent, I learned that I needed Easter and that Easter needs Lent.<>
- also known as Quadragesima (back)
