March 7th ,2010
If at first you don't...
We’re at the third week of Lent and here’s where people can make some unfortunate judgements if things haven’t been going well. You see some folks look at Lent as if it’s one of those Olympic games. You know,: halfway down the slope and you miss a gate, or halfway through your ice-dancing routing you fall while attempting the triple lutz, or you hit the edge of the half-pipe halfway through your snowboarding routine. Right then, the Olympic athlete knows that he/or she has lost a chance for the medal.
But Lent isn’t a measure of our performance. There are no medals to be won or lost. So chocolate cake was your undoing? Nicotine won over your best attempts to quit smoking? You were giving up going to bad places on the internet and suddenly you found yourself where you promised not to go? This was the Lent you were giving up gossip, but your mouth ran quicker than your brain?
Any “failure” to keep Lent’s promises doesn’t stop God from loving us. Those failures just show us what we suspected all along: we fall down. We’re weak. We need God more than ever. During these next three weekend we’ll be helped by the powerful Gospels in which we meet people with different weaknesses: the woman at the well has been married five times -- why do her husbands keep dropping her? The man born blind has lived all his life in physical darkness. And Lazarus is dead and in the tomb.
Then Jesus comes along and the woman finds acceptance and the love of the messiah. The man finds sight. Lazarus finds new life. Jesus didn’t give up on any of them and he doesn’t give up on you or me right now. So we must not give up either. If the first part of lent had you falling down, get back on those “skis” or “skates” and start over again. Lent is a time of renewal and the most important thing to renew is our relationship as a disciple of Jesus. Easter will be coming soon and there, in the light of the resurrection, we’ll say “I do!” to the baptismal promises that make us disciples all over again.
So look at Lent as a chance to keep on going in the right direction, despite the falls along the way. We can do it together.
