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The first time I read Chesterton, I was on a flight with 2 friends for a girl’s weekend. Yeah, it’s not exactly chick lit, if that’s what’s you’re wondering.  I was in a stupor when we reached Tampa, because well, CHESTERTON.  If you haven’t read this book, it’s probably in the top 5 of my top 10 books every Christian should read.  It will make you very contemplative on your girl’s weekend, but will certainly give you a broader, more orthodox view of the faith.  He’s brilliant, to say the very least.  Philip Weingart said of his writing:

“Since Chesterton was both a genius and the son of a saner era than our own, the ideas which coursed through his head may astonish modern readers. He seems to turn the world on its head; the book is a continuous feast of the delightfully unexpected. To Chesterton, faith is reason, orthodoxy is liberty, the order of our universe is as unexpected as the wildest fairy tale, and heeding tradition is as natural as allowing all citizens to vote. Modern readers at first will think him just a little bit crazy, but as they warm up to his approach, they will begin to feel that perhaps his point of view is healthier than theirs, and in the best of cases, they will begin to right themselves.”

The last paragraph in G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy has always stayed with me.  I’ll let you read it for yourself.

“And as I close this chaotic volume I open again the strange small book from which all Christianity came; and I am again haunted by a kind of confirmation. The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall. His pathos was natural, almost casual. The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their tears. He never concealed His tears; He showed them plainly on His open face at any daily sight, such as the far sight of His native city. Yet He concealed something. Solemn supermen and imperial diplomatists are proud of restraining their anger. He never restrained His anger. He flung furniture down the front steps of the Temple, and asked men how they expected to escape the damnation of Hell. Yet He restrained something. I say it with reverence; there was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness. There was something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.”

Maybe Chesterton was right. Maybe the thing that was written all over the face of our Lord was joy.  Maybe the thing He kept from us was His laughter.

Lent is a gift to us, just like everything else from our Father.  40 days to remind us that this is not our true home.  40 days to remember what it is like to be hungry or alone.  40 days to repent for all the ways we’ve made a mess of every last thing.  And 40 days to rejoice that Healing has come.

I think our approach to spirituality (or my approach to my spirituality!) is often flawed, perhaps especially during Lent, and we have a tendency to take ourselves too seriously.  John Kleinig puts it this way:

“The modern interest in spirituality is a bit like our interest in health.  Our obsession with health is not at all healthy;  in fact, it emphasizes the problems that we have without providing much of a solution to them. So, too, with our concern for spirituality!  Despite the multitude of books on spirituality that can be found in the bookshop, Christians seem to find it harder than ever to practice what they believe.  So many aspire to be spiritual high fliers but never seem to get off the ground for any length of time.  As the failures mount, so does the fascination with what seemingly cannot be achieved.  The only thing we learn is that something is lacking in this part of our lives.  But we end up with no understanding on how to fill the void……If we have problems living the life of faith, if we have challenges in our practice of prayer, the solution is not to be found in what we do, our self-appraisal, or our performance.  The solution to our problems is found in what we receive from God Himself, in His appraisal of us, and in His gifts to us.  Like our physical life and health, our spiritual life is something that is given to us, something that is to be received and enjoyed and celebrated.  Our piety is all a matter of receiving grace upon grace from the fullness of God the Father. “

I don’t like being people who are crash dieting because they’ve made food into something utilitarian.  They’ve lost the joy of eating.  I’ve done it myself and it made everyone around me miserable.  We make the same grievous error in our faith life. We’ve come to think it’s something we do, so we try to set our faces like a flint, only to discover that Someone has already done that for us.

I’ve made the mistake of going on  a spiritual crash diet during Lent, trying to do all the things that make one pious and saintly.  It’s was zero parts spiritual and 100 parts crash.

Make it your one goal to rediscover the joy of your first Love and then breathe a sigh of relief when He rediscovers you instead.

Let the most sane among us teach us something about Christ as we remember that JOY is the business of heaven.

So, happy Lent, as we are all reminded of the things that have clouded the joy.

I must have been about 7 years old when I rode in Daddy’s red Ford truck over to the Little River to fish off the train tracks.  He used corn right out of the can for bait.  I mostly ate the corn and asked a lot of questions.  Daddy shushed me and showed me over and over how to hold the pole and how to reel the line, the Daffy Duck tattoo on his forearm moving funny when he pulled back on the rod .  I kept casting into the mess of brush over on the river banks.  He kept having to stop and untangle me.  He never complained and he didn’t talk much.  He was bringing me into his world, not making a false world that centered on me.   The gift was time with him.  Yet, it was so ordinary and unassuming.  It didn’t look like much of a gift at the time. It seemed a little boring, hot, and pointless.  That is until we finally caught a fish.   Then, I remembered why we were there.  The goal was to catch fish, despite the fact that I always wanted to somehow make the day about me and how much progress I was making at becoming a fisherman.

There are so many lessons there, for Lent and for everyday.

The Father wants to give us the gift of Himself, if we would but sit quiet and listen and learn.  This is not about us.  This is about Him and how much He loves us and how willing He is to share His life with us.  And the goal?  To make us fishers of men.  To help us focus on something besides ourselves, which is a most monumental task because our self-importance does not die easy. Not without a fight to the very death. But even as our death to sin is a pretend death—because tomorrow it will rear its ugly  in our lives again, in Christ there is real death to, and for sin –His death for us and His life for us. That’s Lent. (via Todd Wilken)

The season of Lent comes around every year to discipline us, to sharpen us, to make us warriors, to make us fishermen—but mostly to remind us that Christ’s cry from the cross, “It is finished,”  has never been more true.  It is finished.  Real death has been conquered, salvation has been won.  You have been made his child and there’s is nothing left to work for, nothing left to do. He’s done everything to bring you home. Your needs have all been met in Him.

So, if Lent is about Him and his perfect sacrifice, then why are we fishing again?

Because Lent points us away from ourselves toward Christ and toward our neighbor.

Lent is not about you, it’s about Him and him.

Your neighbor has needs like you can’t imagine.  His life is falling apart just like yours, but without the lifeboat of Christ.  He’s hungry, hopeless, sick, dying, or maybe just as self-obsessed as the rest of us.  He has never felt so desperate.  He has never been so alone.  But, you and I have  failed to see him because we are so entangled in our own appetites.  We are so worried about our own bank accounts, our own stomachs, or even our own spirituality.  We are busy chasing our own noble dreams, perhaps even doing things for God.  But, we’ve forgotten that God doesn’t need anything from us—that all we bring to the table is sin and greed and selfishness.  Lent reminds us that He doesn’t need us, but he has placed a plethora of people in our lives who do.

And maybe when the fog of our appetites and our obsessions slowly starts to fade, we can see more clearly why we are here what we’ve been placed here to do.  We can take baby steps to start living our lives in service of those whose needs are more pressing than ever—the people in your life like your husband, your children, your boss, and the widow that sits next to you at church.

It’s easy for Lent to become an exercise in how disciplined we’re becoming or how contrite we are for our sin.  We will twist anything into a self-fest, or at least I will.

The reason we want to practice self-discipline is actually not for ourselves—it’s for our neighbor, so that all of the things that keep us in bondage, the things that keep us from rightly serving our people can be stripped away.

May this Lenten season turn our eyes outward—to a Father who loves us so much that He will freely give us all things and teach us, however slowly and however painfully,  to be fishers of men.

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A big thank you to Jennifer, from the Old Painted Cottage, for featuring our lake house as her cottage of the month!

And a shout out to my friends, Heather and Angela, on their newly launched blog, called Sports Mom Survival Guide! They’re giving away an Amazon gift card today for $100.  Happy Launch ladies!