2020 Lenten Devotional - Rotten

ROTTEN: A Fresh Look at the Fruit of the Spirit

White’s Chapel Media 185 S. White Chapel Boulevard Southlake, TX 76092 www.whiteschapelumc.com info@whiteschapelumc.com ©2020 by Dr. John E. McKellar and Dr. Todd Renner Published in the United States of America by White’s Chapel Media.

All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from White’s Chapel Media.

White’s Chapel Media is a publishing and communication division of White’s Chapel United Methodist Church.

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New Revised Standard Version® (NRSV®) Design: Alec Hanson Layout: Susanna Cunningham Printed in the United States of America.

Contents Introduction............................................................................. 7 Day One.............................................................................. 11 Day Two.............................................................................. 13 Day Three............................................................................ 15 Day Four.............................................................................. 18 Day Five............................................................................... 21 Day Six................................................................................ 23 Day Seven............................................................................ 25 Day Eight............................................................................ 27 Day Nine............................................................................. 30 Day Ten............................................................................... 33 Day Eleven.......................................................................... 36 Day Twelve........................................................................... 38 Day Thirteen........................................................................ 40 Day Fourteen....................................................................... 42 Day Fifteen........................................................................... 45 Day Sixteen.......................................................................... 47 Day Seventeen..................................................................... 51 Day Eighteen....................................................................... 53 Day Nineteen....................................................................... 55 Day Twenty.......................................................................... 58 Day Twenty-One.................................................................. 61 Day Twenty-Two.................................................................. 63 Day Twenty-Three............................................................... 66 Day Twenty-Four.................................................................. 68 Day Twenty-Five.................................................................. 70 Day Twenty-Six.................................................................... 72 Day Twenty-Seven............................................................... 75 Day Twenty-Eight................................................................ 78 Day Twenty-Nine................................................................. 81

Contents Day Thirty...........................................................................

Day Thirty-One...................................................................

Day Thirty-Two...................................................................

Day Thirty-Three................................................................

Day Thirty-Four..................................................................

Day Thirty-Five...................................................................

Day Thirty-Six.....................................................................

Day Thirty-Seven................................................................

Day Thirty-Eight.................................................................

Day Thirty-Nine..................................................................

Day Forty............................................................................

83 85 87 89 92 95 98 101 104 106 109

Introduction to Lent INTRODUCTION TO LENT… From the earliest days of the Church, Christians have held with great reverence the 40 days of Lent. An annual invitation to a time of reflection, Lent is a season for self-examination and penitence. It is a season of honest evaluation as we confess who we are and who we are yet to be. These 40 days ask us to go on a journey; they invite us to travel through the darkness of Calvary’s pain that we might celebrate the joy and love of Easter morning in new light and in new life.

To do this, though, we must prepare ourselves. Lent, then, is a time for prayer and fasting. It is a time for silence and for the studying of God’s Holy Word. It is, truly, a time when we are asked to take seriously the call of the spiritual disciplines. More though, it is a time for us to be mindful, a time for us to be soulful… a time for us to be honest about what keeps us from following the way of Jesus Christ.

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INTRODUCTION TO THIS YEAR’S SERIES...

A life of faith is not made. It’s grown. Such is the goal of Lent: to meditate on what God is doing in, to and for us; to be aware of how we nurture, water, feed, and prune the holy seeds planted within us by our good confession of the faith; and to allow God’s light to shine brightly upon the fertile fields of our souls. But as God grows a deeper faith within us, there comes a moment when we must harvest and put into practice the faith we believe, for fruit left growing on the vine quickly rots in the sweltering heat of life.

Found within Paul’s letter to the Galatians, we read of the beautiful fruit God desires to grow in our lives: the Fruit of the Spirit. Each week, we will focus on one of these virtues by examining the danger that comes when we allow that gracious fruit to rot.

As always, our purpose is simple: to elicit a response.

It is for us to be inspired, to be challenged and to be changed. Our purpose, hope and prayer is that all our hearts will be “strangely warmed” as we reflect upon the Bible’s promises and that we will allow the fruit God is growing in us to feed and nourish others.

Dr. John McKellar Dr. Todd Renner 2020

“The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

There is no law against such things.”

– Galatians 5:22-23 –

WEEK ONE:

Apathy – The Rot of Love & Joy –

“And he said, ‘Go and say to this people: “Keep listening, but do not comprehend; keep looking, but do not understand.”

Make the mind of this people dull, and stop their ears, and shut their eyes, so that they may not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and comprehend with their minds, and turn and be healed.’”

– Isaiah 6:9-10 –

Day One // February 26 // The Roots of Apathy “Apathy is the glove into which evil slips its hand.”

– Bodie Thoene –

Rotten. It’s not a pretty word. It’s not an inviting word, and it’s certainly not a word that we’d want to describe us. But underneath all the gilding and frill with which we protect ourselves, there are seasons in all our lives when we’re confronted with the hollowness of a spiritual void, the deadening malaise of a soul once alive.

Doubt. Anxiety. Fear. Guilt. Shame. It takes on many names – each of them a sworn enemy of grace. Each seed robbing the fertile soil of our lives of its life-giving succor. Surrounded by these endless echoes of pain and brokenness, it’s easy for us to move to a place of helplessness and hopelessness. It’s easy for us to resign ourselves to a life trapped by un-feeling and un-caring

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because we tell ourselves that apathetic numbness is preferable to suffering and pain.

But these holy days of Lent invite us to a new reality, to a new understanding: that it’s through suffering that we find salvation, that it’s in the dark where we find the Light, that it’s only in dying that we finally, fully find life… and life abundant!

The call of the crucified Savior was never one to safety. It was never one to ease. His call was never to a life without bumps or bruises. His stirring call was always to faithfulness – to surrendered service and humbled love… even for our enemies. It was to believe even when doubt threatened to undo us. Christ’s call was – and still is – to choose to feel, even when it feels better not to feel.

Healing for a soul so emptied is not found in more emptiness. It’s not found in apathy. It’s found in the hope that, for as real as the darkness is, it does not last forever. It’s found in moving through, working through, living through and feeling through the pain to find love and joy ripening on the other side.

Day Two // February 27 // Hard-Heartedness “What is more tragic than to see a person who has risen to the disciplined heights of tough-mindedness but has at the same time sunk to the passionless depths of hardheartedness?”

– Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. –

It is an almost guaranteed certainty: when couples come into my office for premarital counseling, the inventory we have them fill out reveals that each feels the other to be too stubborn. And when I ask them about it, they both smile and nod and agree. There is a certain charming whimsy to the hard-headedness of our humanity, a certain universality to our dogged determination (within reason, of course).

Hard-headedness is one thing.

But hard-heartedness is another.

The ill-tempered uncle of apathy, hard-heartedness takes un-feeling to a different, more crippling level. It distances us. It ensnares us. Hard-heartedness relegates us to a proxy life of mere existence and not real living

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– devoid of the things of the heart: love, joy, peace, comfort.

And it’s not intentional. We don’t choose it. We don’t wake up one day to find the rot of hard-heartedness imperiling our souls. It happens gradually. It happens one hardening layer at a time: one betrayal, one broken promise, one broken heart at a time. In the place of those wounds, scar tissue begins to build – tough, dense and increasingly impenetrable.

Like the armor young David prepared to wear when he faced the giant Goliath, for as protective as a hardened heart may seem, it immobilizes us. It restrains us. It hampers us as our defenses become our downfall.

And just like David, the only real alternative we have is to take our armor off, to dare to enter the fray unguarded and unafraid. The only real choice we have is to trust. To trust that, even if our hearts should break once more, God will be faithful to meet us there in the midst of our agony and to heal us. It is that promise, it is that holy commerce that Calvary secures. For it is only the broken and wounded who ever get to experience the God who restores. It is only those brave enough to hurt who are ever truly made whole.

Day Three // February 28 // Emptiness “Once I knew only darkness and stillness; my life was without past or future... but a little word from the fingers of another fell into my hand that clutched at emptiness, and my heart leaped to the rapture of living.”

– Helen Keller –

Once we fail to eat fully of the fruit of love with God and each other, we are left with the rotten fruit of emptiness. If love brings a feeling of connectedness and well-being, the rotten fruit of emptiness brings loneliness, hopelessness and self-absorption.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the great American poet and Harvard professor, was still grieving over his wife three years after she died. He couldn’t seem to move ahead in his life, but one particular day changed all that. Longfellow realized that his life was slipping by without really living it. He was stuck in emptiness. He realized that he needed to embrace love and begin to live again.

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This revelation inspired Longfellow to sit down and write a poem, which he titled, “A Psalm of Life.” These words are a call to battle emptiness. The first two stanzas read: “Tell me not, in mournful numbers, Life is but an empty dream!

For the soul is dead that slumbers, And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!

And the grave is not its goal; Dust thou art, to dust returneth, Was not spoken of the soul.”

Lent reminds us that we all have times when we stand before God with an empty cup. But in those moments, we need to remember that only an empty cup can be filled. We have to be honest about our emptiness. We must also recognize that we can’t fill the cup on our own. How many lives have been lost chasing happiness and not joy, endless activity and not peace?

Theologian Paul Tillich wrote that three fears have gripped humanity. Before the Christian era, it was the fear of death. During the Middle Ages, it was the fear of guilt. Today, Tillich said, it is the fear of meaninglessness.

The abiding question of our age, then, is this: How do we fill our empty cups? We need to take full advantage of the fruit of love. Embracing the love Jesus has for us is not some abstract ideal; it is a way of battling emptiness – and it is the only lasting way. Jesus said, “Come to me,

17 all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest� (Matthew 11:28). Literally, it was to fill emptiness and meaninglessness that Christ came into the world. We need to eat frequently of the fruit of His love. We need to surround ourselves with reminders of that love. We can travel the globe trying to fill our cups; but until we fill our lives with Jesus, we will never be satisfied.

Day Four // February 29 // Growing Fullness “For fifteen years, I was a teacher of youth. They were years out of the fullness and bloom of my younger manhood. They were years mingled of half breathless work, of anxious self-questionings, of planning and replanning, of disillusion, or mounting wonder.”

– W. E. B. DuBois –

Years ago, a British newspaper offered a prize for the best response to the question, “What is wrong with the world?” The winning letter was the shortest. This note simply said, “Dear Sir, I Am,” and it was signed G. K. Chesterton. Lent thrusts us into a season of deep self-reflection. It is a time to evaluate how we have squandered God’s opportunities and filled our lives with our own agendas rather than God’s.

Psalm 127:1 declares: “Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. Unless the Lord guards the city, the guard keeps watch in vain.” The question is: Who builds the house of our lives? Whose values guard our communities? Unless we fill our lives

19 with the Lord’s values, we are wasting our time. Until we fully embrace the way of love, we labor in vain. We need to fill our lives with the principles of Jesus so that we might discover joy.

It was said of Ernest Hemingway that, each January, he gave away certain items that were valuable to him to prove that they did not possess him. If he could not give them away, he knew they held a crippling power over him. The Lenten examination begs that kind of hard honesty from us. What have we filled our lives with that keep us from Christ? It may be possessions. It may be attitudes. It may be arrogant self-reliance. We may have taken the beautiful gift of love and let it rot with apathy, hard-heartedness and emptiness.

But, in faith, there is always the possibility of a new beginning. The Lord provides the fresh fruit of love for us to feast upon. We can rebuild our lives and grow our communities into sanctuaries of love. Frederick Buechner once wrote, “If it seems pretty depressing to start the Lenten season asking important questions of our lives and of the values we are cultivating, just remember that while we start with the Biblical imagery of ashes and sackcloth, be also reminded that the joy of Easter and the Eternal can be found at the end of this challenging journey.”

WEEK TWO:

Discord – The Rot of Peace –

“There are six things that the Lord hates, seven that are an abomination to him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans, feet that hurry to run to evil, a lying witness who testifies falsely, and one who sows discord in a family.”

– Proverbs 6:16-19 –

Day Five // March 2 // The Roots of Discord “Small communities grow great through harmony; great ones fall to pieces through discord.”

– Sallust –

One of the most exquisite gifts the Spirit offers is peace. When we do not know the things that make for peace, we are left with rancor and discord. Discord is that place where we experience a stifling lack of agreement or harmony; and, at its worst, that place where it raises its ugly head to derail the mission and purpose that God has for our lives. Winston Churchill made an insightful comment in the midst of a debate: “Must we fall into the jabber and babel of discord while victory is still unattained?”

Healthy debate and disagreement is not discord.

Discussion without the quest for peace is, for it sows the worldly seeds of conflict.

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Discord grows when we focus on the wrong values.

A wife was in an automobile accident one day. She phoned her husband and immediately he asked, “How much damage did it do to the car? Whose fault was it?”

Then he issued this guidance: “Don’t admit to anything.

Tell the policeman that you have nothing to say until you talk with your attorney. I will call the insurance company.” Then she asked rather testily, “Have you got anything else to say?” “No,” he replied. “Well,” she said, “just in case you’re interested, I am in the hospital with five broken ribs.” Instantly we see, that in the panic of the moment, the husband forgot the main thing. His first question should have been, “Honey, how are you?”

Discord can also grow when we avoid our emotions.

When we don’t work through our anger, when we avoid healthy conversations, we can live like a volcano bubbling under the surface, just waiting to erupt. Dr. Harriett Lerner of the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas says “our anger may be a message that we are being hurt, that our rights are being violated, that our needs are not being adequately met, or simply that something is not right. Anger deserves our attention.”

Lent draws into an honest evaluation of our lives. Do we have issues that need addressing? Are there some honest conversations that we have put off? Have we, in a desire for “superficial peace,” unintentionally allowed discord to fester, keeping us from God’s best?

Day Six // March 3 // Misunderstandings “In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood.”

– Henry David Thoreau –

One morning, Charles Kuralt was driving up a mountain road in Peru when a man appeared suddenly out of the trees by the road. He was wearing a black hood over his face, waving something in his hands and shouting. Kuralt was terrified. He knew that the man must be a gun-wielding bandit. He was trying to decide whether it would be safer to plunge ahead or drive back down the road. The man kept shouting and running toward Kuralt’s car. That settled it. Charles put his car into gear and bolted straight ahead. But the strange man changed his course to intercept him on the road.

Charles drove for his life. The man reached the road, removed the hood from his face and waved an object in his hand frantically, just as Kuralt zoomed past him.

Then he saw what he was holding. It was a fish. The man had stayed up all night fishing in a nearby lake, had

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finally caught something, and was now trying to sell it to a passing motorist. But Kuralt, thinking of mountain bandits, was terrified. Later he wrote these words about the incident: “We met as if by destiny, but one of us was from another world, and wildly misunderstanding.”

How often are we like that? We jump to conclusions.

We assume things about others. We are quick to judge without knowing all the facts. This was a constant challenge for the disciples with Jesus. They thought they had Him figured out. They relished His popularity and basked in the power of His miracles. And then, He started talking about the cross. And more than this, He said they must take up their own crosses if they wanted to follow Him, but they could not understand what He was saying. They tried to argue Him out of it. In fact, Matthew tells us that Peter took Jesus aside and said, “God forbid it, Lord! That [the cross] must never happen to you.” But He turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things” (Matthew 16: 22-23).

Peter misunderstood. And I wonder about us? How much of our discord is because we assume we know that which we could never comprehend? We hear what we want to hear and ignore that which is inconvenient.

We stereotype and jump to conclusions too quickly… and in so doing, we miss the peace that Christ offers us.

Day Seven // March 4 // The Lost Art of Disagreeing “This is one of the marks of a truly safe person: they are confrontable.”

– Henry Cloud –

We are surrounded by an onslaught of noise, the deafening cacophony of a world that has forgotten how to disagree… or, at least, how to disagree productively.

Yes, we still know how to fight. We still know how to yell and scream and pout. We remember how to cling to the security of our own rigid self-righteousness and sanctimony. We know how to fight, but not well.

We see it on the news. We hear it in boardrooms and in our own bedrooms. We feel passionately about certain issues, and that is a good thing. The rot takes hold, however, when we so determinedly stick to our positions without ever allowing space for another’s opinion. We forget that, sometimes, we may not be entirely right… and that “they” may not be entirely wrong.

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No one person – outside our Lord – is ever fully, perfectly informed. No one – outside our Savior – is ever eternally right. Which means that we must enter into every conversation with a humility and an openness to learn, to grow. We must engage every exchange fully aware that the other person is just as precious in God’s eyes; they are someone for whom God’s Son died to save.

If nothing else, that common starting point may stir in us a willingness to listen – to really listen: listening to understand, not listening to respond. For in that sacred soil is planted the seed from which the fruit of peace grows.

Will we ever fully agree on every matter? Of course not. In fact, I hope not because there is a profound beauty in that diversity of opinion, in that interwoven tapestry of human experience. In the holy space between those threads, though, let us be found to be a people of peace, a people who follow after the One who, on a rugged and splintered cross, showed us the painful way of dying to self for a cause larger than being right – the cause of being good.

Day Eight // March 5 // Competing & Comparing “Don’t always be appraising yourself, wondering if you are better or worse than other writers. ‘I will not Reason and Compare,’ said Blake; ‘my business is to Create.’

Besides, since you are like no other being ever created since the beginning of Time, you are incomparable.”

– Brenda Ueland –

There is nothing more distasteful than when the fruit of peace goes bad, when it morphs into competing and comparing. Nothing can make us more miserable or sour our view of the world so fast. I grew up in a three high school city. My school was the “new school” that transitioned from a junior high. The only problem was that our facilities were not on par with the other schools in town. We had no auditorium or football stadium; our classrooms still had the feel of the elementary school our facility had once been years before. We had to borrow facilities from the other, more prominent schools when they were not using them. It was easy for us to get into the “that’s not fair” mindset. It was hard not to compare

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ourselves to those who had more. The irony was: I went to a fabulous school with amazing teachers, and I got a quality education. We had the “more” but just didn’t realize it.

We do that too often. We spend too much time and too much energy comparing our lives to those around us. As if life were some sort of competition that can be won, we maneuver and we scheme to get ahead. We build bigger houses. We work 26 hours a day to get that corner office. We scrap and we scrape to compete with the Jones’ across the street, and all the while, the Jones’ are competing with us in this unending and selfdefeating sport of comparison.

In our incessant comparing, though, we fail to see and fail to celebrate what we have. We fail to see the blessings that abound in our lives. We become blind to all the things that we do have because all we see are those things that we don’t have. From the confines of her own blindness, Helen Keller once said, “Instead of comparing our lot with that of those who are more fortunate than we are, we should compare it with the lot of the great majority of our fellow men. It then appears that we are among the privileged.” How true and wise ring her words.

And into this mess, emerges the cross. The singular emblem of our faith, we wear it and champion it as a sign of victory; but what we forget is that the cross was not a

29 symbol of success but, in the eyes of the ancient world, it was one of failure. Its nature was cruel and brutal; it was the unenviable place for thieves and rebels, not for the Son of God. But that is how God chose to redeem the world: by comparative failure - in fact, by redeeming failure - and loss and grief and death. God chose to save the world not by winning the game but by losing it‌ and by that loss, God secured ultimate victory.

Day Nine // March 6 // Losing It (Anger) “Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.”

– Mark Twain –

The fetid rot of anger is nothing new. The Old Testament restricted the end of violence: “Thou shalt not kill;” and the New Testament restricted its beginning: “Thou shalt not get angry.” In the Sermon on the Mount, we hear Jesus’ admonition, “But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment” (Matthew 5:22). Jesus knew that anger is a spiritual poison that wreaks great damage – and deceptively so.

In fact, it’s been said that of all human sins, anger is quite possibly the most enjoyable. “To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontation

31 to come; to savor the last toothsome morsel of both pain you are giving and the pain you are getting back, in many ways it is a feast for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton of the feast is you,” the theologian taught.

Does this mean that there is never a proper time to be angry? Scripture is clear. There is a time to be angry: but at the right thing, at the right time and for the right reason. It’s a righteous anger, then, that must compel us.

The Apostle Paul writes: “Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger” (Ephesians 4:26).

When the weak suffer at the hands of the strong, anger should swell. When children die for want of water and their parents die from lack of bread, we should fume.

When evil gains yet another stronghold, we should mount up with righteous fury. For without anger, the moneychangers would still be in the Temple. Without anger, slavery would still exist, and women would be prohibited to vote. Not all anger is sinful, but some is. When we brood and hold onto slights, we create a climate that can destroy our souls. Mark Twain once said, “I never killed anyone, but I sometimes read the obituaries with great pleasure.”

We need a sense of honesty about our anger. Is our anger motivated for others? Is it the clarion call to right a wrong? Or is our anger more serving to us?

Is it more about our concerns rather than God’s? One commentator wrote, “There are many who try to justify their anger as ‘righteous indignation.’ On closer

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inspection, however, such righteous indignation turns out to be only hate with a halo. They hide malice under a zeal for orthodoxy. Their intention is not to correct an offense, but to punish an offender.”

We cannot understand the looming events of Holy Week without sensing the seething anger of the powerful, ruling elite against Jesus. If Jesus was right, then they were wrong. The chief priest Caiaphas said, “It is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed” (John 11:50).

The brooding anger that had been building for years would end up fashioning the nails that would hold Jesus to the cross… and the rot of anger still threatens to hold us bound, as well.

Day Ten // March 7 // Finding It Again (Growing Peace) “God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.”

– C. S. Lewis –

The world is full of cheap imitations. We substitute lust for love. We substitute money for value. We substitute fleeting happiness for eternal joy. But like everything we try to manufacture, there is a shelf-life to our diversions. Trophies tarnish. Happiness dims. And lust’s eyes wander.

As C.S. Lewis says, outside of God there is no real peace. There is no meaningful substitute or alternative source. Peace is the very real fruit that grows in (and only in) the life of faith. Does that mean that we won’t face storms and difficulties? Does it mean that we won’t struggle or doubt? Of course not. What it means, though, is that even as the storms rage on the outside,

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we can be held by a resolved sense of peace within – knowing He still calms the storms with but the words of His mouth: “Peace. Be still.”

The philosopher once said, “I do not want the peace which passeth understanding; I want the understanding which bringeth peace.” Understanding. Knowing.

Trusting. These are the seeds that reap a harvest of peace. Goodness. Vulnerability. Righteousness. These are soil where they are planted.

“Righteousness and peace kiss,” the Psalmist penned. It’s a pairing found throughout the Bible, an intimate relationship between the peace we seek from God and the righteousness He seeks from us: doing the right thing, at the right time, in the right way, for the right reason. If we are truly searching for peace – and who isn’t? – then we must be willing to prepay the tariff on its receipt. We must be willing – eager, even – to live a life worthy of peace. We must tend the fragile soil of our lives, casting aside every stone of malice, deceit, and pride, to furrow the ground where peace might grow from righteous seeds of a faithful life well lived.

WEEK THREE:

Stridence – The Rot of Patience & Gentleness –

“Put to death, therefore, whatever in you is earthly: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed (which is idolatry). On account of these the wrath of God is coming on those who are disobedient.”

– Colossians 3:5-6 –

Day Eleven // March 9 // The Roots of Stridence “I came. I saw. I conquered.”

– Julius Caesar –

What pushes us? Really. What is it that compels us to press and to challenge and to do? To do more? To do better? More than just competition, what lies beneath our gasping-for-breath assault to win: to win at life, to win at business, to win at school… to win at all costs?

Could it be that, lurking just beneath the finely-honed facades that we don every morning, there is a sneaking suspicion that we really are nothing more than the sum total of bank accounts or our resume?

Fueled by such an economy of self, it is no surprise that our world has grown ever more encumbered by the rot of stridence – that welling compunction of the flesh to prove itself capable and worthy: worthy of love, worthy of notice, worthy of grace.

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Like a man dreaming of mansions from the shantytowns he’s always known, we know that there’s more. We know that there’s better. But we fool ourselves into thinking that we can get “there” on our own, that we can build those mansions with our own two hands.

“All it’ll take,” we tell ourselves, “is just a little more effort, just a little more strain.” Little are we aware, however, that, in all our striving, we sacrifice the very mortar that holds the mansion together: gentleness, patience, grace.

It amazes me how often Jesus had the opportunity to react: to unfair criticism, to unwarranted angst, to unjust condemnation and rage; more amazing, however, is how often He refused to do so. Our Lord refused to get embroiled in the world’s weak-kneed harvest of spoiled fruit. He refused to lower Himself to the stridency of this life and, instead, reflected on the Life that is truly life.

He reflected on His real Source of strength, on His real Source of power; Jesus reflected on His real Source of purpose and identity and worth. And, in so doing, He reflected to us the doorway of that sort of life that we – all of us – were created to know.

Day Twelve // March 10 // Stridence in Speaking “Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.”

– Benjamin Franklin –

It is a colossal and tragic lie that we insist upon teaching our kids: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” What a disservice we inflict upon them by allowing them to believe – even for a moment – that words haven’t the capacity to wound. From experience, we know that words can, indeed, inflict the worst kind of pain, the worst kind of torment. Deeper than the cutting of flesh or the snapping of bone, words have the incredible power to wound our souls.

It is for that reason that we must always be mindful of the ways we speak. From the emptiness of boasting to the hurtfulness of lies, like the Almighty, we have the awesome ability to create simply by speaking. We

39 can speak and create hope, or we can speak and create despair. We can speak and create love, or we can speak and create hate. With our words, we can bless or we can curse; with them, we can bolster a soul, or we can tear a soul to shreds. And technology hasn’t helped.

Today, we have more ingenious, more insidious ways of being catty, unChristian and unkind – for all the world to imbibe.

If by putting a bit in a horse’s mouth we’re able to steer the enormous steed, the Book of James suggests, then it would behoove us to tame our own tongues, as well. Such is the Gospel’s call: to a practical piety that finds its life and its voice in the mouths of the faithful – each word a gateway that invites others to know the Savior. If we must gossip, then let it be of what the Lord has done. If we must tell a tale, then let it be of the Good News. Let our stridency be for the Kingdom’s work and not for our own. Let it be to the glory of God and to not any other.

Day Thirteen // March 11 // Stridence in Listening “Language is a more recent technology. Your body language, your eyes, your energy will come through to your audience before you even start speaking.”

– Peter Guber –

If stridence is the rotten fruit of gentleness, then awareness of how we listen is one of the keys to keeping the fruit fresh. We overlook the critical importance of body language in communicating. Body language is the unspoken element of communication that we use to reveal our true feelings and emotions. Our gestures, facial expressions and posture are windows into our souls.

When we are able to “read” these signs, we can have greater empathy and find a great capacity to really hear each other. It can greatly enhance our ability to understand the complete message of what someone is trying to say and make us more aware of people’s reactions to what we say and do. We can also use it to

41 adjust our own body language so that we appear more positive, engaging and approachable.

Jesus was the master of reading body language.

He could cut through people’s words to see into their hearts. He knew the story of the woman at the well from observation. He could read the arrogance of the rich young ruler before he even spoke. His tuned-in nature allowed him to have honest, frank conversations with a gentle candor. He was able to convict others without judgment, challenge without rancor, and communicate in a way that seared people’s hearts with God. We need to battle stridence with an empathy which comes from paying attention to body language. When we are having a difficult or uncomfortable conversation, don’t just think about our next words. Watch the person we are speaking with. If they are exhibiting one or more of the following traits, they will likely be disengaged, disinterested or unhappy: Arms folded in front of the body.

Minimal or tense facial expression.

Body turned away.

Eyes downcast, maintaining little contact.

When we notice this, we can adjust what we are saying… or how we are saying it. This Lenten journey calls us to a new awareness. Our goal in life should not be to win debates. Our goal should be to connect with others so that love can grow. What a wonderful testimony it would be if someone could say, “I experienced Christ in you.” We should settle for nothing less.

Day Fourteen // March 12 // Stridence in Pacing “Become slower in your journey through life. Practice meditation if you suffer from ‘hurry sickness.’ Become more introspective by visiting quiet places such as churches, museums, mountains and lakes. Give yourself permission to read at least one novel a month for pleasure.”

– Wayne Dyer –

The true life of faith is not for the faint of heart. It is not for the timid or the cautious. It is not fed by the lazy or lethargic. It leaves no room for apathy or indifference or self-concern, for the path of faith leads to a rugged and splintered cross. This type of faith – this selfless and sacrificial faith – is rare. It is hard. It requires much more of us then we want to give… more than we think is actually possible. So, it’s easy to understand why so many of us don’t try. In the face of such staggering odds, it’s almost commonsensical to give up, to put our lives of faith on autopilot, to let them take care of themselves.

43 We hurry ourselves with all of the outer trappings of what we think “faith” is supposed to look like but none of the dearest and deepest elements of what it really is. We sate ourselves by going to church and by trying to make the right choices (most of the time); we open ourselves in small ways to being formed by faith’s subtle hands; we allow ourselves to be informed by faith… but we pull short of letting ourselves be fully transformed by it.

Transformation takes time. It is a rigorous, timeconsuming, life-consuming process of tending the fertile soil of our souls. It requires patience and devotion, for the first sprouts of growth that break free from the parched ground of our lives come slowly into the sunshine. Deep beneath the surface, though, we must know that the roots of love and gentleness, of hope and joy and peace are tapping into the rich springs of God’s goodness. There may be few outward signs of growth, and it can be a frustratingly tedious journey; but even then – especially then – we must continue to water the fragile seedlings of our faith. We need to bathe them with prayer and worship, with silence and patience. We need to feel the forest breathing and to hear the growth of the trees.

We need to use these days of Lent to slow down and to listen more. Spend some time in nature. Be honest and real about our true priorities. Set limits and give ourselves some “technology free” spaces. Don’t make mountains out of molehills. For when we slow down, we

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see and hear better. We need to heed Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sage advice: “Earth’s crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God, But only he who sees takes off his shoes; The rest sit round and pluck blackberries.”

Day Fifteen // March 13 // Stridence in Praying “We are trying not so much to make God listen to us as to make ourselves listen to Him; we are trying not to persuade God to do what we want, but to find out what He wants us to do. It so often happens that in prayer we are really saying, ‘Thy will be changed,’ when we ought to be saying, ‘Thy will be done.’ The first object of prayer is not so much to speak to God as to listen to him.”

– William Barclay –

One of the great secrets of the spiritual life is to learn to pray gently. Conversely, strident praying (where we try to plead with God to give us what we want) has a way of leaving us empty and disappointed. We must learn to master the perfect prayer, the prayer that never fails: “Thy will be done.”

When we do, we can rest in peace because, in that place, we recognize that we are not God. We don’t always know what is best; God sees that which we cannot. Someone once said that we are like a fly crawling

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across an oil painting. We are so close to it that we can’t see the bigger picture.

Jesus teaches us this. In his last hours on earth, He returned to a garden He might have played in as a child.

In the powerful prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus shows us the profound, honest connection He had with God. He knew that He was mere hours away from the cross. He was acutely aware of the horror, pain and embarrassment that awaited Him. Jesus shows His humanness in the agony of that prayer in two parts. The first: “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me.” He is saying, “God, I don’t know if I can do this; it may be too hard.” His prayer was so intense, Scripture said, He literally sweat blood from His pores, but He doesn’t stop there. Even though He’s not sure he can go through with it, Jesus adds the second part of the prayer: “Nevertheless, not my will but yours be done.”

Jesus prayed the prayer that never fails: Thy will be done.

We need to learn to let go. To quit pushing so hard.

And to gently approach our Heavenly Father who knows what we need even before we ask – trusting in His grace and good will for us.

Day Sixteen // March 14 // Growing Gentleness & Patience “The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.”

– Nelson Henderson –

It’s not unfamiliar. We’ve all heard Henderson’s words before and, more, we’ve all been the benefactors of them. With great humility, I think back upon all the saints who invested in me – who saw something in me that I didn’t even see in myself. I think of the Sunday School teacher who taught me the Lord’s Prayer. I think of the chaplain who introduced me to grace. I think of the great list of individuals who, fighting their own strident urges, took the time to notice and to care. I think of them and am aware that I will never be able to repay their kindness: their patient hours of gentleness that taught me, changed me and urged me on the path

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toward God. And in that humbled place, I am pierced by the question: Who am I to grow impatient with another?

It is a guiding spiritual principle, as well. For the great tendency is to see faith as a subject to be argued, debated and examined. But with Jesus, faith is different: it is not one more idea to discuss in a world that loves ideas. Faith, instead, is a life that has to be lived. It is a journey traveled imperfectly along an ever-changing and dangerous terrain. It was as true in Jesus’ day as it is in our own, and a person cannot make that journey unless they begin: planting the first seeds in faith – trusting that even the storm clouds and rain will make their seeds grow.

But as any farmer will tell you, awaiting the harvest takes time. It takes patience and gentleness. We can’t rush the tender shoot from the soil. We can only do what we can to make sure that the ground is nurtured – that it has all the food, warmth and care that it needs.

Gently tilling it. Tenderly ridding it of the weeds.

We have all been given gifts. These are the seeds that are unique to us; they make up the stories of our lives. But seeds don’t do much good in the world if we just hold on to them. The purpose of the seed is to be planted so that it can grow and bear much fruit… and stridency does nothing to improve the chances of a harvest.

49 For a life of faith is a life of seed-planting. Admittedly, most of us will never see the seeds we plant bear fruit.

Most Sunday School teachers never get to see the effect they had on their students. Mission workers often don’t get to see great change explode in their communities.

Those who greet and help in the parking lot don’t always see the difference a smile and a welcome can make in the life of a visitor, who is unsure or uncomfortable. But all of these little acts, all of these seeds planted do bear fruit… in time. They do matter.

And, maybe that’s the key to the elusive and growingever-rarer fruits called patience and gentleness: to plant our seeds with the harvest in mind – seeing with our mind’s eye the orchard bursting forth with new life and sweet nectar that we’ve been entrusted to tend. Maybe that’s the trick: to plant remembering that we, too, were once tended by another. With that holy awareness, our labor in the field becomes an act of worship; it becomes an act of faith. With that holy awareness, patience and gentleness become the fruit that are born from seeds planted long ago – a single, sustaining link in the ongoing ingathering of Christ.

WEEK FOUR:

Callousness – The Rot of Kindness –

“To whom shall I speak and give warning, that they may hear?

See, their ears are closed, they cannot listen.

The word of the Lord is to them an object of scorn; they take no pleasure in it.”

– Jeremiah 6:10 –

Day Seventeen // March 16 // The Roots of Callousness “Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.”

– William Shakespeare, Hamlet –

Callouses are the rough, thickened patches on our skin that have been hardened by years of wear and work.

And when we do not keep the fruit of kindness fresh, we can develop a kind of spiritual callousness. We may feel great grief and hopelessness about humanity because we are overwhelmed by bad news. It’s incessant. It’s too much. And when we don’t know what to do with it, we risk becoming numb to tragedy, veering from empathy to callousness, to a hardness of heart and mind and soul – a hardenedness that contaminates every area of our lives, leaving us feeling hopeless about everything.

The danger of callousness is that it subtly creeps up on us when we are not aware. A powerful example of this occurs during Air Force pilot training sessions. In these sessions, pilots are warned about “hypoxia,” or lack of oxygen to the brain. The pilots are put in a chamber that simulates the atmospheric conditions at 30,000

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feet in the air. Then, the pilots are told to remove their oxygen masks. Unmasked, they are asked to write out the answers to a few easy questions. Within a minute after they begin writing, their partner in the exercise moves quickly to force the oxygen mask back on the pilot’s face. After receiving the oxygen, the pilot looks down at the paper and is shocked to discover that the answers are illegible. Here’s what unnerves the young pilots: they thought they were writing clearly.

That is what spiritual callousness does to us. We don’t realize that we have become hardened. We don’t realize the unkindness of our words. We don’t realize that we shut out opinions that we don’t want to hear.

One of the great warnings of spiritual callousness is found in the Book of Isaiah. The prophet had been thundering God’s word for people, imploring them to return to righteousness, but they didn’t want to hear the truth anymore. Here is how they are described: “For these are rebellious people, deceitful children, children unwilling to listen to the Lord’s instruction. They say to the seers, ‘See no more visions!’ and to the prophets, ‘Give us no more visions of what is right! Tell us pleasant things, prophesy illusions. Leave this way, get off this path, and stop confronting us with the Holy One of Israel!’” (Isaiah 30: 9-11) Lent calls us to an honest assessment. Have we become spiritually calloused? Have we become hardened in, to and by the struggles of life? Have we slipped into an attitude of unkindness without being aware?

Day Eighteen // March 17 // Inattention “Familiarity breeds contempt only when it breeds inattention.”

– George Santayana –

It’s all a blur. We rise every morning and gird ourselves up for yet another day of business and busyness. Surrounded by the electronic buzz of our modern-day lives, we hustle to make the most of every moment. We consume the day before us and in the process, are consumed by it, too.

Transparent to us was the crimson sunrise; invisible, the golden moon. And all the quiet moments of grace in between fell passionless on deadened ears. Did our inattention make the sun less bright? Did it cause the moon to blush? Of course not. The lacking was not in them… but in us.

It is the insidious curse of our age: the split-attention, the inattention, the hardening curse of multi-tasking in a world that’s come to value productivity over the value

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of what’s actually produced. Like the well-worn hands of a plowman, our souls carry the callouses of struggles and storms; but maybe even more frequently, we carry the callouses of the mundane.

We’ve let ourselves become immune to the glory of God’s creation; we’ve let ourselves take His handiwork for granted – His goodness, wonder and grace. And it’s in that hollowed-of-the-holy existence that we crave to taste transcendence. We want, we need to experience God’s presence; we yearn to know His love. But in its ever-presence, we fall victim to the passing whims of not noticing.

What starts with our commerce with God is transferred to our commerce with others. We fail to notice. We fail to notice the hurt and the pain. We fail to notice the despair and need. Brokenness’ ever-presence has become the mere background scenery upon which our productive lives of convenience are enacted, and the hurting are only the bit-players. And little by little, layer by layer, the rot of intention grows. For just as sinful as the harsh words we speak, are the healing words that go unspoken. Just as sinful as the things we might long to see are the needs we fail to see. And that, too, is Lent’s call: to slow down, to look around and to pay attention. Is there a cost to attentiveness? Absolutely.

It’s not called “paying” attention for nothing. It will cost us to see our neighbor’s pain, but it is a price well worth paying to follow after the One who paid the price for us.

Day Nineteen // March 18 // Indifference “Love cannot endure indifference. It needs to be wanted.

Like a lamp, it needs to be fed out of the oil of another’s heart, or its flame burns low.”

– Henry Ward Beecher –

One of Jesus’ most troubling parables is found in Luke 16. In the parable, entitled “The Rich Man and Lazarus,” we read of a certain rich man who had ignored the beggar, Lazarus, at his gate. While living in unquestioning luxury, he had missed the needs right in front of him; and, at the end of his life, the rich man finds himself in hell. The story is troubling because the rich man was not mean or intentionally cruel; we could justify in our minds his eternal outcome if he were. But, in fact, he never mistreated Lazarus. He never kicked him. He never chased him away. He never lectured him about getting up and getting a job. Still, his unacted-

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upon cruelty was not enough for him to escape his fate.

Why? What did he do that was so horrible that he should deserve such a terrible sentence? He acted as though the circumstances of Lazarus’ life were supposed to be that way. He accepted it all without question. It never occurred to him that the fate of Lazarus’ birth and the conditions of his life could be changed. Lazarus, therefore, became not a part of suffering humanity but just a part of the landscape. In a word, the rich man was indifferent: indifferent to Lazarus’ plight, indifferent to his hunger, indifferent to his needs. He was the neighbor who he’d never met… let alone loved.

When we let the fruit of kindness rot into indifference, we thrust ourselves into a troublesome danger zone. We accept the status quo. We give the crushing problems of the world quick recognition, only a passing glance as we immediately think: “Somebody somewhere ought to do something about that.” And we overlook the fact that that Jesus says to us: What will you do about that?

In a classic Garfield cartoon: one cold winter night, Garfield looks out the window and sees Odie the Dog peering through the window. Garfield thinks to himself: this is horrible. Here I am in the comfort of a warm house, well fed, and there’s Odie outside, cold and hungry, begging to get in. I can’t stand it anymore. I just can’t stand it. And with that thought, he goes over to the window and closes the curtains.

57 How often do we do that? We see problems, dysfunction and suffering that we don’t want to deal with, and we simply close the curtains. Jesus is crystal clear in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. It’s not our badness that will send us to hell; it’s our lack of goodness. It’s our lack of trusting in and following after Him. It’s how we close the curtains on those who represent suffering humanity. Maybe we suffer from compassion fatigue. Maybe life has unintentionally calloused our hearts. Lent calls us to eat deeply from the fruit of kindness and compassion, to peel back the brittle layer that has grown on our souls… remembering that, at the end of the age, we will be judged by our love.

Day Twenty // March 19 // Laziness “A life of leisure and a life of laziness are two things.

There will be sleeping enough in the grave.”

– Benjamin Franklin –

Sometimes, a preacher crosses over from preaching to meddling. We feel that way with today’s topic: laziness. How often are there good things we want to do, things we know that need to be done, but we just don’t know where to start. Maybe it demands too much of us.

Maybe we’re unsure if we have the right resources. With all our reasons and all our excuses, we let ourselves off the hook and allow all our good intentions to remain just that. And we really don’t want to call ourselves lazy; we prefer to say that we suffer from “work-avoidance syndrome.”

59 We chuckle when we see laziness as a part of the human condition. We remember the story from 50 years ago: two older gentlemen were discussing the new technology of TV remote controls. One man was just put out. He said, “That is one luxury I can live without.

It’s a sad day when I get so lazy that I can’t tell my wife or son to get up and change the channel.” And, though we may grin at that, the disease of laziness – physical, emotional, and spiritual – is no laughing matter.

Do we own our individual struggles with laziness?

Do we accept that we, oftentimes, avoid God’s call and claim on our lives? We do not eat freely of the fruit of kindness that always puts intentions into action and service. We forget that God wired us to spend a lifetime of doing good for the Kingdom. In the Christian plan, there is no retirement until heaven. Armand Hammer, the industrialist who died in 1990, at the age of 92, was once asked how a man his age had the energy to continually circle the globe to conduct business. He said, “I love my work. I can’t wait to start a new day. I never wake up without being full of ideas. Everything is a challenge.”

Lent calls us to reflect. True meaning and joy come from doing and serving. God has given us a job to do; we all have a sacred calling. We need to discern what that is, and then we need to get busy following that call. Our goal should be to live in the spirit of Hunter Thompson

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who wrote: “Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming ‘Wow! What a Ride!’”

Day Twenty-One // March 20 // Tone-Deafness “Somewhere we know that, without silence, words lose their meaning; that without listening, speaking no longer heals; that without distance, closeness cannot cure.”

– Henri Nouwen –

It is an ancient curse that feels shiny and new: tonedeafness. It’s not the actual physical disease that denies one’s ears the ability to hear, but the spiritual and emotional disease that denies our souls the ability to discern. It’s the one who laughs in the midst of another’s tears. It’s the one who dances to the music of a dirge.

And we’ve all been guilty of it.

We have all been in situations where we were not present enough in mind to read the cues. We’ve all missed the signals. Perhaps it’s not a cause of the rot, but it is certainly a symptom. The poorly worded phrase.

The ill-timed joke.

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It is a spiritual matter. By the sake of our baptism and good confession of the faith, we are all ministers of Jesus Christ. We are all ambassadors of His Kingdom – expected to conduct ourselves with a certain level of statesmanship and tact. It is the only way the Gospel ever spreads: one believer telling one seeker of grace, one believer telling one seeker of redemption. But our well-intentioned words will carry only as much weight as our actions can support.

Time and time again, Jesus warned the religious of their hypocrisy. He confronted their echo-chambers where they heard only what they wanted to hear. He challenged the deafness of their faith: the priest who passed by the wounded traveler and the Samaritan who heard his helpless cry… and acted.

We live in a similar world – in a time when it is increasingly easy for us to disconnect from all that we would rather not see and from all that we would rather not hear. But the call of the Almighty is that we would unstop our obstructed ears and unclog our fitful souls and act, that we would perceive with our hearts that which our heads cannot. To break for (and with) the broken. To hear the cry of the needy. To speak to the least and the lost and the lonely – offering them the healing grace only God provides through His children.

Day Twenty-Two // March 21 // Growing Kindness “Kindness is in our power, even when fondness is not.”

– Samuel Johnson –

Kindness is a choice – one that grows from the seeds of goodness, patience and love. More than mere niceness, kindness goes one step further. It traverses the wide gap that separates me from you to reflect the very nature of God – the very nature of the God who, in Jesus Christ, spanned the chasm of sin and death to invite us nearer to Him. It wasn’t deserved. It couldn’t be earned. But in God’s kind forbearance, He made the choice to love us – broken and wounded sheep in need of a Shepherd.

Then, what we must come to understand is that God invites (and expects) us to continue that healing and

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inviting presence in the world. God expects kindness from his flock.

Kindness sounds so simple. In fact, it is. Kindness is simple. But it is not easy. It is not easy to extend ourselves to the one who’s hurt us. It’s not easy to care for the one who’s rude. Kindness is simple; it’s uncomplicated, but it is certainly not easy.

It is the way of sanctification – the way of being made more like Jesus – in the flesh. It is about our choices: our day-in, day-out decisions about who we want to be and about Who we want to serve. When our flesh wants payback, kindness demands grace. When our flesh screams now, kindness whispers wait. When our flesh seeks convenience and utility and haste, kindness suggests prudence and the “gentle answer that turns away anger” (Proverbs 15:1). Kindness demands that we fight back against all that our lower angels would bid us think and say and do - to reflect the love and compassion of Christ. Was He kind? Absolutely. But we minimize who Jesus was if we assume Him nice – for, nice has no teeth; nice has no spine. Nice only pats us shallowly on the back while it winks at our sin. Kind wants more than that; it commands more than that. Kind tells us what we need to hear, but it does so in a way that we can hear it.

WEEK FIVE:

Selfishness – The Rot of Generosity –

“For where there is envy and selfish ambition, there will also be disorder and wickedness of every kind.”

– James 3:16 –

Day Twenty-Three // March 23 // The Roots of Selfishness “The poison of selfishness destroys the world.”

– Catherine of Siena –

Lurking in the shadows of Eden, born of the rotted fruit of that forbidden tree, selfishness stirs within each of us. In fact, it’s been said that the seed of selfcenteredness and self-seeking lies at the heart of every human sin. It’s there in pride. It’s there in lust. It’s there in rage, envy and deceit. It’s self-centeredness that prods us to wag our tongues with gossip. It’s self-centeredness that riles the waves of greed. Even now, the serpent’s intoxicating hiss beckons: you can be like God. It can all be about you. It should be all be about you.

But the call of faith, the call of Lent, the call of Gethsemane, Calvary and Christ begs something different; it begs something better. They summon us to a life lived for something bigger, to a life lived for Someone bigger… to the One who, moved with holy selflessness, prayed, “Nevertheless.”

67 It’s not a big word. Only a dozen letters. But in those 12 – one for every tribe of Israel, one for every apostle who’d move the world – Jesus showed us the way of faith – the way of real, life-giving, life-changing faith. In prayer, He had told God exactly what He wanted; then He said, “Nevertheless…” “Nevertheless, not my will, but thine be done.”

In that place of utter humility, in that garden of complete surrender, our Lord modeled for us the life we’re all called to in faith: a life that’s not about us, a life that’s not about what we want nor what we feel entitled to. It is, rather, a life offered to God: to what God wants from us and what He wants for us.

Our selfishness, deceit and pride; our fear, apathy and laze; our addictions to drugs, alcohol, sex and work: they all constantly call out to us. Their seductive, selfsatisfying appeal drawing our eyes away from that place where our face is supposed to be set, drawing our face away from eternity. They entice our face away from Christ and away from the Kingdom we’re supposed to be building right here, right now. And all the forces of darkness would love to keep it that way: for us to think only of ourselves and of our own.

Nevertheless, freedom comes when we will fight against all that would bid us to settle. It comes as we push back against the spirits and the flesh that want only to indulge. Freedom comes as we accept that wonderful irony only God could pen: that it is only in selflessness that we will ever truly be free to be truly ourselves.

Day Twenty-Four // March 24 // Vanity & Pride “It would astonish if not amuse the older citizens to learn that I (a strange, friendless, uneducated, penniless boy, working at ten dollars per month) have been put down as the candidate of pride, wealth, and aristocratic family distinction.”

– Abraham Lincoln –

The rotten fruit of selfishness too often begins with misplaced pride and vanity. We forget that there is no such thing as a self-made person. We are helped and blessed by others consistently; and when we lose sight of that, we lose our way. Coach Barry Switzer used to love to say: “Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple. That mentality should never be said of us. We constantly need to check our attitudes. We continually need to be aware of those danger words: I, me and mine. To be generous, we cannot let selfishness seize us with its empty and thankless hands.”

69 One of the ways we might battle this attitude of pride is to look for ways to pay forward the help we have been given. Sportswriter Gil McGregor was a personal friend of the late Maya Angelou. He was contacted by a charity in North Carolina who had been trying to get Dr. Angelou to host a dinner at her house to raise money for their cause. They tried to call, they tried to contact her agent; they tried everything they knew to do, but they could not get through. In desperation, they approached Gil to ask if he might help. He agreed to ask Dr. Angelou, and she agreed. After they chatted for a while, he asked, “Dr. Angelou, I hope you don’t feel that I am using our friendship in order to get you to volunteer?”

Her response was a classic. She laughed and said, “Mr. McGregor, if one cannot be used, it only means that one is useless.”

Lent calls us forth to be people who are willing to be used; more than that, it calls us forth to be people who desire to be used. Everything we have is a gift from God. Our resources, our talents and the success in our careers – it should all be seen and received and used as fodder to help those who follow after us. Our lasting legacy will come in the people we help and the encouragement we give. We should never let our pride nor vanity keep us from discovering the Life that really is life.

Day Twenty-Five // March 25 // Greed “He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have.”

– Socrates –

When the beautiful fruit of generosity spoils, we are left with one of the ugliest words in our language: greed. It evokes images of Ebenezer Scrooge alone and freezing on Christmas Eve, too tight to share in the holiday. Or maybe the one we see is billionaire Howard Hughes who ended his days as a miserable recluse, fearful that others were out to get him. The word greed comes from the Greek word meaning “to have more.”

Greed is that little voice within us that nags, “You ought to have more.”

One day, when Abraham Lincoln practiced law in Springfield, Illinois, he met a neighbor on the street.

Lincoln was holding two of his sons, one in each arm.

Both boys were wailing and crying. “Mr. Lincoln,” the

71 neighbor asked, “what’s the matter with your boys?”

“The same thing that’s the matter with the world,” Lincoln answered. “I have three walnuts. And each wants two.” Greed is that state of mind that constantly wants more.

And it is insidious because it comes masked with good intentions. We want to provide for our families.

We don’t want to be dependent. We want to be secure.

But in chasing the good, we fail to see when we cross the line into greed. We start to feel entitled. We start to look down on others who don’t “work as hard as we do.”

We start to justify our lifestyles. Douglas Beyer writes, “Greed has been renamed, ‘enterprise.’ It swaggers forth proclaiming a new virtue called, ‘profit motive.’ It looks so clever and sophisticated that nobody can believe that its heart is cold and calculating.”

There is only one remedy for greed: generosity.

Church Father John Chrysostom said, “God has invested capital with you. It is not your property, but a loan made

by Him, made to give you opportunity to exercise mercy to those who are in need.” When we share with others, we recognize that what we have is not ours. We start to notice human needs and to soften our hearts to try to help. And although greed might seek what is right, generosity always seeks what is good.

Day Twenty-Six // March 26 // Gluttony & Excess “It is the sign of a great mind to dislike greatness, and to prefer things in measure to things in excess.”

– Lucius Annaeus Seneca –

The very word gluttony conjures the image of a table spread with sumptuous food and one foolish person preparing to gorge himself on the feast. But in reality, gluttony is a rot that goes much deeper and spreads much further than mere food. It is the unchecked appetite that would pull us distant from God. It is any desire or craving that is taken to excess and, when driven to its extreme, can lead to potential addiction.

Yes, it can be about food… but let’s not let ourselves off the hook so quickly. We can also glutton ourselves with alcohol, with sex, with work, with hobbies… even with our favorite sports team. Each of these desires may be healthy and good, but the trouble comes in the excess.

In a need to fill ourselves, we fall to the temptation of

73 thinking that “more” will make us feel better. We chase the elusive “enough” as if it were always unattainable – thinking that with just one more trophy, with just one more trip, with just one more (fill in your word), life will be better, and I will feel complete. It’s all in our thinking; for gluttony is, in reality, a sin of the mind. It is idolatry.

We chase “too much” trying to find happiness, when the truth is that gluttony always hurts us and makes us feel worse. We must come to understand that completeness comes only as a gift, only as a fruit of faith.

One commentator said of our culture: “Human beings are the only creature whose desires increase the more they are fed. Your family dog wants to no more than his ancestors wanted when curled beside the caveman’s fire. Dogs and cats are content with what dogs and cats had a thousand years ago, but not us.

People are different. Give them an inch and they want a foot. Give them a foot and they want a yard. Give them a yard and they want a swimming pool in it.”

Given this, one of the antidotes for such gluttony is gentle, humble, Christ-like simplicity. It’s found in contentment. It’s found in less, not more. And since gluttony is a sin of the mind, we have to reframe our thinking. We have to debunk the myth that “more” is always better, that “more” will bring greater joy. We have to move from acquisition and consumption to cherishing the little things: a walk, a garden, a good book. And we

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have to reframe our thinking about what we really want.

When an American tourist visited the renowned Polish Rabbi, Hafetz Chaim, he was surprised to find him in an unadorned room filled with only books, a table and a bench. “Where’s your furniture?” the visitor asked.

“Where’s yours?” the rabbi answered. “Mine? I’m only a visitor here. I am just passing through.” “So am I,” said the rabbi.

In a world where what we own too quickly comes to own us, we desperately need to remember and to reclaim our worth and our true identity. We are not the sum total of our experiences – they don’t get to define us. We are not the mere amalgam of what we have and who we know. We are children of God, made in His image, temples of His Holy Spirit. And that is enough.

Day Twenty-Seven // March 27 // Closing Off “Forgiveness is like this: a room can be dank because you have closed the windows, you’ve closed the curtains. But the sun is shining outside, and the air is fresh outside. In order to get that fresh air, you have to get up and open the window and draw the curtains apart.”

– Archbishop Desmond Tutu –

I’ve always been fascinated by caves. Growing up, my father – never one to waste time (or money) at roadside “tourist traps” – would speed past the glowing neon signs inviting guests to explore Meramec Caverns or to marvel at Ruby Falls. So, when I was asked to go amateur spelunking as a teenager, I jumped at the opportunity. Deep within the earth’s recesses was a world I’d only heard about: it was dark and silent – quieter than any place I’d ever been before. The only sound was of centuries old water seeping through the rock all around.

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There was a certain feeling of safety in that cave, a sense of shelter. It’s no wonder, then, that the ancients made their homes in grottos amongst the cliffs. It’s no wonder that the early Church once met in caverns outside the gates. Even Aristotle opined about the protection that caves provide – a tempting place to hide from the shadows and pain outside.

And what we know to be true is that there are times in all of our lives when we run back to the security of our own self-hewn crags. There are times when, out of fear or anxiety or overwhelming pressure, we throw all our defenses up, when we build the broadest of walls. There are times when all we want to do is to escape. We want to keep the world out there so we can be safe in here: in a world of our own making, in a world under our own control. We close ourselves up and shut ourselves off from all that we perceive to be threats.

But control is just an illusion. We can control nothing outside of ourselves; and, honestly, most of us struggle to do even that. When Peter witnessed the crucifixion, when he remembered his biting words of denial, he must have been overcome with such guilt. He must have experienced a shame that forced him back to his old ways of coping: in fact, as John’s Gospel closes, we see the apostle back on the waters fishing. He reverted to his comfort zone; he went back to his cave. But Jesus

77 called him from it. Standing on the shore, our Lord called Peter by name; He called him back to life.

There is no way of avoiding the inevitable pains and struggles of life. We will be judged, criticized and hurt in ways we can’t even imagine. In those moments, though, we have a choice – we always have a choice: we can close ourselves off and try to cope with the stench of unused and rotting generosity. Or we can believe that the promises of God are true: that all things can work together for good. We can hide out in the darkness or, there, we can let God shine all the brighter.

Day Twenty-Eight // March 28 // Growing Generosity “You have not lived today until you have done something for someone who can never repay you.”

– John Bunyan –

There is a beauty in the imagery that portrays the growth of the great spiritual gifts as fruit grown from a tree. There is no more admirable goal in life than to be generous. But generosity is grown. We are born into the world crying to get our basic needs met. We are instinctively selfish, clamoring for more. We fight for what is ours and resent sharing. But generosity is grown and modeled. When we see how good generosity tastes, and see how it makes our lives flower, we want to branch out into increasing generosity.

In the mid-1930s, during the economic travails of the Great Depression, there was a church in the Midwest known for its magnificent pipe organ. A visitor dropped by the church during the week, and the custodian gave him a tour of the church facility, including the sanctuary.

79 While there, they were admiring the craftsmanship of the impressive pipe organ. As they chatted, the custodian made an off-hand remark. He commented, “I gave the money that had this pipe organ built for our church.”

The visitor was shocked; he responded, “Really?” The custodian continued, “Yes, I used to own a big business and made a lot of money. During those days, I was able to give the money that did this; and then the Depression came, and I lost everything.” The visitor was astounded by the story and the irony that this wealthy man, who gave such a great gift, was now working for the church.

He said, “Wow, I bet you wish you had the money back that you used to buy the organ.” The custodian looked him and said, “No, not at all. If I hadn’t given the organ and kept the money, I would have lost it along with everything else. This is the only thing that lasted.”

In 1 Timothy 6:7, the Apostle Paul teaches us a profound spiritual truth: “We brought nothing into the world, we can take nothing out of it.” All that lasts is what we give away. That is why it is imperative that we grow generosity. This should be a value and goal of the highest priority. The rotten fruit of selfishness can trip us up and ruin our lives, but generosity – of time, support, encouragement, gratitude and love – gratitude gives life and makes it worth living.

WEEK SIX:

Disloyalty – The Rot of Faithfulness –

“Therefore thus says the Lord God: Because you are more turbulent than the nations that are all around you, and have not followed my statutes or kept my ordinances, but have acted according to the ordinances of the nations that are all around you; therefore thus says the Lord God: I, I myself, am coming against you; I will execute judgments among you in the sight of the nations. And because of all your abominations, I will do to you what I have never yet done, and the like of which I will never do again.”

– Ezekiel 5:7-9 –

Day Twenty-Nine // March 30 // The Roots of Disloyalty “It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.”

– William Blake –

They should’ve known better. Maybe I should’ve known better.

Listen deeply. Listen honestly. And you will hear it: the echo of these words reverberating in your own soul. They echo because they bounce – they bounce off the stony walls that we’ve built up to shield us from those times we suffered rejection. They bounce off the chasms of grief, brokenness and pain that were eroded by moments of betrayal. Any of us who’ve ever dared to love another has felt it. Any of us who’ve ever chanced the odds to be truly vulnerable has feared it: disloyalty – the gutting reality that something we’ve trusted has been untrue.

Whether a lie of the heart or a rebellion of the mind – disloyalty comes just close enough into us to jab its wicked dagger into our most tender and unexpecting of places: our souls.

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At its heart, though, such disloyalty is not the absence of loyalty; it is loyalty misdirected, misguided. It is the short-sighted and self-serving operation of those who are looking out only for themselves, who are loyal only to themselves.

What a pitiable and lonely place it must be: to betray a friend for personal gain. What a fearful and monochromatic world in which to live: to be so desperate to get ahead that we’d step on those we’d leave behind.

Faced with such a reality, common sense would tell us to run, to flee. It would tell us to build such high and impenetrable walls that no one would ever be able to get through to hurt us again. But this is not the way of faith; for Jesus knew the wincing pain of rejection – the sight of his followers’ backs running off in the torchlight of Gethsemane. Jesus knew the stinging agony of betrayal – Judas’ approach, his eyes and his kiss. But Jesus’ response was not distance. Jesus’ response was nearness. He would pursue those who ran; He would forgive those who fled. Jesus’ response was not to escape or to protect Himself; it was to give Himself – to give Himself over to all that we would try to avoid, praying that some might believe.

Such is the power of God’s love: that it would see beyond all our own disloyalties and still call us to His side. It calls us to selflessness, grace and to a profound and courageous loyalty to the Almighty – a loyalty that would turn our face to all those who’ve turned their backs.

Day Thirty // March 31 // Deceit “If you wear a mask for too long, there will come a time when you cannot remove it without removing your face.”

– Matshona Dhliwayo –

We live in a day of appearances. We want people to think well of us. We want to appear like we have it all together. We mask our struggles and our doubts.

And in trying to be who we think others want us to be, sometimes we deceive ourselves – we forget who we really are.

If faithfulness is being true to God, then deceit takes that original, unique creation that God made us to be and hides it under a bushel basket. To be faithful means to be honest. It means to be real. It means to be honest about what we want and need and not play passiveaggressive games.

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Lent challenges us to honestly assess how well we are following Jesus. How often do we deceive ourselves?

We satisfy ourselves with good intentions. We excuse ourselves when we don’t give our best. We ask God to bless our desires rather than seek His divine will.

We fall repeatedly for the greatest deceitful thought of all – one that is captured in an old legend. As the story goes, Satan is testing his apprentices in how to trick and ruin human beings. One says, “I will tell them that there is no God.” Another joins in, “I will tell them there is no hell.” Satan is not impressed. He says, “You will deceive no one that way, they know better than that.” A third student speaks up, “I will tell them there is no hurry.”

“Yes,” Satan responds. “Go and do that, and you will ruin them by the thousands.”

The great deceit is that there is plenty of time. How many acts of service have been put off until tomorrow?

How many phone calls are not made; how many relationships are not mended? How many Bible studies are not attended and mission trips ignored? We believe in all those things, and we intend to do all those things… tomorrow. But the Psalmist challenges us: “This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.” (Psalm 118:24) If we want to be faithful, we need to stop deceiving ourselves starting today!

Day Thirty-One // April 1 // Hypocrisy “A hypocrite is one who sets good examples only when he has an audience.”

– Anonymous –

We live in an age where people are becoming increasingly cynical about Christianity. Prominent leaders speak and act in ways that seem so unlike Jesus.

People question our sincerity. In fact, a recent poll asked people if they agreed with this statement: “Christian churches accept and love people unconditionally, regardless of how people look or what they do.” The results were haunting. These was the percentages of people who agreed with that statement: Pastors 76% Born-Again-Christians 47% Church-Goers 41% Outside-the-Church 20% One young man in the poll went on to make this statement: “Christians like to hear themselves talk. They

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are arrogant about their beliefs, but they never bother figuring out what other people actually think. They don’t seem to be very compassionate, especially when they feel strongly about something.”

We are followers of Jesus Christ. When we read the Gospels, we see that when people were down and out, on the bottom of life and shunned by the religious folk, they were drawn to Jesus. He talked to hurting people, broke bread, hung out and laughed with them.

All the while, the religious crowd couldn’t stand Jesus’ familiarity with them. Today, how many who desperately need the Gospel are put off because we, who are Christ’s followers, seem more like Pharisees than like Jesus?

If we are going to be faithful to Jesus in this hour, we can have no stomach for hypocrisy. We will understand that people want us to be real, to tell our stories and to share what Christ has done for us. We will not win people to faith by arguing doctrine and quoting esoteric theologians. We will win people who are hurting by sharing genuine love and kindness, and by treating people with respect, the way that Jesus did. Saint Francis of Assissi gives us our marching orders: “It is no use walking anywhere to preach unless our walking is our preaching... As for me, I desire this privilege from the Lord, that never may I have any privilege from man, except to do reverence to all, and to convert the world by obedience to the Holy Rule rather by example than by word.”

Day Thirty-Two // April 2 // Rebellion “Those who will defend authority against rebellion must not, themselves, rebel.”

– J. R. R. Tolkien –

“No.” It is, regrettably, one of the first words we ever learn as a child. “No” to Mom. “No” to Dad. “No” to peas, carrots and beans. “No,” we chortle as we learn to make our decisions. But, as we age, our “no” becomes a little less endearing. We say “no” to curfews and “no” to limits. We say “no” to all that we think is trying to restrain us from fun – never understanding then what (I hope) we know now: that all those restraints were really just trying to keep us safe.

There is a part of us, though, that never learns that lesson. We live with the constant voice of adolescent rebellion stirring in our guts. We don’t like limits. We

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don’t like restriction. Ironically, we don’t like being told no. So, we take matters into our own aged-but-stillinfantile hands.

We are rebels, you and I. It’s the Gospel’s truth. We’ve rebelled against God’s love; we’ve rebelled against His law. Like impudent teenagers, we have defied the will and expectations of our heavenly Father – and we fear getting caught.

But here’s the thing: the best thing in the world for us is to get caught – to get caught by the One who loved us enough to die for us, to get caught by the One who wants to forgive us and to set our feet on a new and better path. For, like all good and caring parents, God’s limits were never intended to hamper us; they were intended to free us – to free us to live that life that is really life, not to settle for settling, not to endure enduring. The life God calls us to is not a cheap imitation of life; it is life unimaginable, life uncontainable, life eternal – a life made possible only by His death.

For it is in dying to ourselves – rebelling against all our lower angels and against all the whims of our mortal flesh – that we find that sort of life. It is in following Jesus’ own example of surrender, in Jesus’ own act of defiance – defying His own will, defying His own wants, defying His own desires for safety and comfort and ease – that we find the courage to trust God’s good intentions for us, that we finally find the courage to say “yes!”

Day Thirty-Three // April 3 // Double-mindedness “If you don’t make up your mind, your unmade mind will unmake you.”

– E. Stanley Jones –

“I have half-a-mind to git’ you,” my mother would sometimes say. I would traipse dirt onto her newlyswept floor or I would use my “outside voice” inside, and I’d hear it: “I have half-a-mind to git’ you!” With an impish gleam in her own eye, she’d scold me with her half-minded warning… but the other half, the guiding half, the half that always won, was entirely of love. And I would always “git” the point.

More often than we’d like to confess, however, we live with a similar condition. We approach life, not halfminded, but double-minded. Unconvinced. Unsure.

Unsworn. Sure, we say what we’re supposed to say in church and in all the right company; but in our times

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of honest self-awareness, we become aware that we maintain dual “mental citizenship”: with one thought focused squarely on heaven and the following thought still toeing the dull dirt of earth. Our thoughts betray us.

It’s as the Book of James warns us: “A double-minded person is unstable in all their ways” (James 1:8) and that he shouldn’t expect to receive anything from God. Is that because God is capricious? No. It’s because we are. It’s because we try to be fully committed to the cause of the cross and, at the same time, fully committed to our own causes, too. It’s because we try to keep the will of the Almighty in mind while, at the same time, clutching to our own will, as well. And nothing short of a profound, life-changing experience of Jesus can change that: for only He can change our minds, only He can renew our minds, only He can transform our minds.

We’ve all heard the old Cherokee legend. One evening, an elderly tribal brave was speaking to his grandson: “My dear one, the battle between two ‘wolves’ is inside us all. One is evil. It is: anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority and ego. The other is good.

It is: joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.” The grandson thought about it for a moment and then asked his grandfather: “Which wolf wins?” The old Cherokee replied, “The one you feed.”

91 The double-minded life of faith – the one fed only on the meager rations of passing thoughts – always winds up in disappointment. Its fruitlessness leads to dissipation and frustration. But the mind of real faith – the one intentionally and regularly fed by the Spirit – always abounds. Is it easy? No. Is it popular? Of course not. But it is worth it… and it only requires us to finally, fully make up our minds.

Day Thirty-Four // April 4 // Growing Faithfulness “I meant what I said, and I said what I meant.”

– Dr. Seuss –

If we are going to grow faithfulness, we need to be focused on what we are trying to accomplish. We need clarity of call and a single-minded definition of success.

We can’t just drift through life with a casual sense of discipleship. Rather, we must be committed, sold-out followers of Jesus Christ!

Luciano Pavarotti tells the story of his childhood.

When he was a boy, his father, a baker, introduced him to the wonders of song. He urged him to work hard to develop his voice. Arrigo Pola, a professional tenor in his hometown of Modena, Italy, took him as a pupil. Pavarotti also enrolled in a teacher’s college. On graduating, he asked his father, “Shall I be a teacher or a singer?” “Luciano,” his father replied, “if you try to sit on two chairs, you will fall between them. For life, you must choose one chair.” Later in life, Pavarotti wrote: “I chose one. It took seven years of study and frustration before I made my first professional appearance. It took another seven to reach the Metropolitan Opera. And now I think

93 whether it’s laying bricks, writing a book, or whatever we choose, we should give ourselves to it. Commitment, that’s the key. Choose one chair.”

I pray our fondest hope and greatest loyalty is that of following Jesus. We do that through our commitment of prayers, presence, gifts, service, and witness to the church, to the Christ, and to the Kingdom. We do that through our ability and willingness to use our vocations to shine the light of Jesus out into the world. We do it in the ways that we parent our children, love our spouses, and in the kinds of friends we are.

Jesus needs passionate, committed and authentic disciples. I remember being an idealistic 16-year-old with stars in his eyes wanting to change the world with Christ’s love. We would get so moved singing around a campfire: “I have decided to follow Jesus; I have decided to follow Jesus; I have decided to follow Jesus; No turning back, no turning back.

Though none go with me, still I will follow; Though none go with me, still I will follow; Though none go with me, still I will follow; No turning back, no turning back.”

Yes, there have been times when I’ve felt the nagging temptation to turn back. But Jesus kept calling me on – onward towards a renewed passion. Such is my hope for us: to be single-minded and focused, to be faithful and faith-filled Christians Christ can count on.

WEEK SEVEN:

Abandonment – The Rot of Love & Self-control –

“He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”

– Mark 8:34 –

During these somber days of Holy Week, as the rot of evil waged on righteous blood, may the echoes of God’s love move and stir you; may they awaken you to the reality that Jesus endured all this for you... and may you find yourself forever changed by the love and victory that Calvary proclaims!

Day Thirty-Five // April 6 // The Roots of Abandonment “It was always himself that the coward abandoned first.

After this, all other betrayals came easily.”

– Cormac McCarthy –

Half tepid assurance, half eager thrill, the disciples had done what He’d asked. They had found the promised colt and followed Him down the storied mountain: into the valley, into the city and into His passion. It all began so well. “Hallelujah!” they shouted. “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!” It was all working out. It was all going to plan. Surely, Jesus was entering Jerusalem to redeem Israel. Surely, He was there to display the awesome power of God. They clung to their hopes; they clung to their dreams. They needed Him to be who they expected Him to be: triumphant, commanding, supreme – a warrior,

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conqueror and king. Forgotten were Jesus’ warnings.

Erased were His cautioning words of woe. He had told them what was to come, but they ignored it. They wanted to ignore it. They needed to ignore it – abandoning the promise because of the pain.

It is just human nature: we want what we want.

And we all want, we all need the very same things: love, companionship, purpose, value and nurture. We strive and we scheme to manufacture meaning. We plot and we fret conscripting joy. In our frantic chase to find ourselves fulfilled, how easily we abandon the path that actually leads to fulfillment – for it is a path that invariably leads through the darkness. It winds through thorns and deserts and wastes, up into the steep hills and down the treacherous valleys. It is not a path that any would willingly take… unless the destination was worth the sacrifice, danger and risk.

It’s a trip – one into the deep interior of our souls – that cannot be made if only fueled by the fitfulness and faithlessness that gnaw the gracious fruit of love, that rot the precious and ever-rarer fruit of self-control.

It is the disease of our age: abandonment. We abandon our principles for what feigns to be prosperity. We abandon our character for the mere sake of competing and getting ahead. We run, wander and stray – never with the intention of leaving the Savior’s side. We begin with little jaunts, with casual daytrips into the gray.

97 But that is how sin takes root: with little departures, with small abandonments: a “harmless” lie here, an “innocent” glance there. One step at a time, we leave the Almighty’s presence – slowly creeping from Love’s side, soon pieced for us.

And the antidote to such poison is in the poison, itself. It is only abandonment that can save us from abandonment. We must abandon ourselves. It is the holy invitation of these days: to deny ourselves, to fast, to stretch and dare, to let go of the Christ that we want Him to be, in order to accept the Savior we need Him to be.

Day Thirty-Six // April 7 // Abandoned Principles “To sin by silence, when they should protest, makes cowards of men.”

– Ella Wheeler Wilcox –

Jesus arrives in Jerusalem to the adulation of the crowds. His heart was moved by their hopes and dreams… so moved that He wept. Tears of compassion flowed because the people had no idea how to reach the God they sought. Their modes of worship born in the wilderness-journey from Egypt had become hardened, calcified. The religious leaders looked with disdain at the people who could never measure up to their standards.

Behind a wall of hypocrisy and greed, the people were blocked on their spiritual quest.

In face of all that, Jesus walked into the Temple.

This was the seat of the nation’s identity with God. The Passover He’d come to celebrate would have brought

99 observant Jews from all over the region to worship. For many of these pilgrims, it would have been a lifetime dream to celebrate the feast in Jerusalem. They would come to the Temple eager to make the required sacrifices and offerings to ensure their standing in the eyes of God and the community.

Long ago, practices were established to help these sincere seekers worship. The animals displayed in the outer courtyard of the Temple, the Gentiles’ courtyard, made it unnecessary for long-distance travelers to bring creatures for sacrifice along with them. Instead, they could be purchased at the Temple site, itself. Likewise, the moneychangers took in coins of all sorts, from all regions, and exchanged them for the accepted currency for the Temple, so that the pilgrims could pay their annual Temple tax.

What started out as an act of help had turned into a hindrance, into a source of manipulation over the years.

Animals were sold at outrageous prices. The money changers charged exorbitant exchange rates. What started out as an aid to the faithful had turned into a shocking source of avarice. The sounds and smells of the animals, cattle, sheep and birds, filled the air. The bantering and bargaining between sellers and buyers snuffed out any spiritual atmosphere. The place of prayer was overwhelmed by the economic activities of Temple business.

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It is into this chaotic scene that Jesus walks.

Remember how Matthew’s Gospel records this moment: “Then Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who were selling and buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves. He said to them, ‘It is written, “My house shall be called a house of prayer”; but you are making it a den of robbers’” (Matthew 21:12-13).

Temple worship had so drifted from its intent, that Jesus said their customs must be abandoned. It remains a stark warning for us. We must be aware of traditions we cling to that have lost their spiritual meaning. We must never hold onto the forms of worship that have lost the heart of worship. Our God is alive and moving.

And He is jealous for us. Jesus beckons us to bring down the walls for those who seek God. What do we need to abandon to love Jesus and all those He would give His life for?

Day Thirty-Seven // April 8 // Abandoned Agendas “For you will certainly carry out God’s purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John.”

– C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain –

One of the disturbing moments of Holy Week is the moment when one of the 12 disciples, Judas, betrays Jesus for 30 pieces of silver. He had a first-hand seat to the greatest moment in history, and he missed what God was doing.

We remember that Judas was a zealot. He had a political agenda. He was looking for a military Messiah to restore the Davidic monarchy. He kept trying to force Jesus to be the One he wanted, rather than accepting who Jesus was.

Judas was saying to Jesus, “Read the signs. You are at the height of your popularity. The crowds are shouting

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‘Hosanna – Save Us Now!’ You have just cleansed the Temple; You’ve shown your strength. You are teaching about the final days, inspiring the vision of God’s reign.

Seize the moment. Let’s march on Rome.” But Jesus refused to meet his expectations.

Judas couldn’t adjust his agenda; and in bitterness, he betrayed God’s Son. We can ponder his motive. Was it disappointment? Was it an effort to force Jesus’ hand and inspire the others to take up a sword in retaliation?

We can never know the heart of Judas, but we see clearly Jesus’ response. “Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end” the Scriptures tell us.

Jesus continually shows us what love is all about.

It is loyalty when plans fall apart. It is determination in chaos. It is that grit that refuses to walk away when the tide of public opinion turns. True love has a strong strand of stick-to-it-ness in its DNA. It is Peter who falls asleep in the garden when Jesus needed him most, but who woke up and defended Jesus with his sword against the armed guards. It is disciples lurking in the shadows during Jesus’ trial, afraid to speak up but too devoted to walk away. It is John and Mary at the foot of the cross with their hearts breaking at the injustice they could not stop.

Holy Week begs a question that causes us to squirm.

Is our discipleship more like Judas’ or like John’s? Too often our commitment lasts until it ceases to be fun. It

103 lasts until it fails to meets our needs. We walk away from prayer when the answers don’t suit us. We want what we want, when we want it. And when anyone disappoints us, we move on. But we look back to Jesus, and we remember that there is a cost to love. There is a price for grace. And only when we understand the sacrifice of a great commitment can we plumb the depths of a great devotion. Benjamin Franklin once said, “Be slow in choosing a friend, and even slower in changing.”

Day Thirty-Eight // April 9 // Abandoned to Man (Maundy Thursday) “It is strange to be known so universally and yet to be so lonely.”

– Albert Einstein –

He had stooped. Heaven bowing near the earth to wash their mud-caked feet – all Divinity wiping worthless and fouling dirt. And He had blessed: breaking the bread and pouring the wine – the Savior serving sinners. And when He was done, He said that it is in being broken that we are made whole. He said that it is in being poured out that we are filled. He said that it is in accepting the very moments of pain that we long to avoid that we find our meaning and healing and peace. But it didn’t make sense – not then, and sometimes not even now.

It defies all that we think we know. It presses us beyond all with which we’re comfortable. To break, stoop and serve - to hurt in places we’d rather defend.

105 The words still ambled through their thoughts as they made their way to a garden.

There, amidst the snarled olive grove of Gethsemane, He prayed. Like the branches of those trees, He was knotted, conflicted; His humanity fighting against His deity. “Let this cup pass from me,” He prayed, “but not my will, but Yours be done.” Father, I don’t want to do this… but I will for You… and I will for them. And returning to His disciples, the stillness of that tender, excruciating moment was broken – the demonic hiss of Roman steel bouncing off jagged rocks, snarled glee lit by flickering torches. He was arrested and abandoned – abandoned by those He’d just blessed, abandoned by those He’d just served. He was abandoned to man’s feckless whims and to the silence and loneliness and pain.

For on that night when Jesus would be betrayed by a traitor’s kiss, on that night when our Savior would willingly give Himself up for us, He showed us what it is to bring about the Kingdom of God on earth. He showed us how to live out our sacred call – with one foot on holy ground and the other in the world’s common mud.

In this garden, in this act of selfless obedience, in this moment of pure surrender, Jesus showed us that it is in the stooping selflessness of the believer that God’s glory dwells. It is there that His will for us is accomplished. It is there – where master becomes servant and enemy becomes friend – that Jesus becomes Lord.

Day Thirty-Nine // April 10 // Abandoned to God (Good Friday) “Good Friday is not about us trying to ‘get right with God.’ It is about us entering the difference between God and humanity and just touching it for a moment. Touching the shimmering sadness of humanity’s insistence that we can be our own gods, that we can be pure and allpowerful.”

– Nadia Bolz-Weber, Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People –

Great poetry and the cadence of angels capture the joy of resurrection. On Good Friday, words escape.

We cannot bear to look at the Son of God suspended between heaven and earth. We cannot really imagine the horror. The pain. The shame. The sins of humanity crushing the brow of our Jesus. After the searing agony of those hours, He utters: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46). And with those words, He breathes His last breath and abandons His earthly life to God. What does is mean for us to be still and touch this moment? To realize beyond all our agendas, pretense and hypocrisy that we can’t save ourselves. That

107 ultimately, to find eternal life we too must pray, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”

Actor David Niven recounted a story he was told about: it was an event that took place in 1940, in the waters just off Dunkirk, France. World War II had begun.

The Nazis had overrun the European continent, had destroyed the French army, and had pushed the British Expeditionary Force to the point of annihilation. As that army waited for rescue from across the English Channel, thousands of soldiers and civilians were trapped. Three thousand of them crowded onto a rescue ship sent from Britain called Lancastria. Listen to what Niven was told: “They were just pulling up the anchor when three dive bombers came. One bomb hit, went down the funnel, and blew a huge hole in the side; and she quickly took on a terrible list. In the hold, there were several hundred soldiers. Now there was no way they could ever get out because of the list, and she was sinking.

And along came… a Roman Catholic priest, a young man in a Royal Air Force uniform. He got a rope and lowered himself into the hold to give encouragement and help to those hundreds of men in their last dreadful hour… knowing he could never get out, nor could they. The ship sank and all in that hold died. The remainder were picked up by the destroyers and returned to England to the regiment I was in, and we had to look after them, and many of them told me that they were giving up

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even then, in the oil and struggle, and the one thing that kept them going was the sound of the soldiers in the hold singing hymns.”

In our hour of trial, do we sing hymns? Do we trust our lives to the One who bore the cross for us? Can we say “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”

Let’s don’t be too quick to get to Easter. Let’s don’t be in haste to change the channel. We need to linger here.

To touch this moment. Here, we learn who our Savior is.

Here, we remember the Source of our strength.

We need to reflect on the words of Charles Wesley who touched that moment: “Was ever grief like Thine, Jesus, Thou man of woe!

The visage and the form divine, Why were they mangled so?

That man through Thee restored God’s image might regain, And by the sorrows of his Lord, In joy eternal reign.”

Day Forty // April 11 // Abandoned to Hope (Holy Saturday) “Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist.

Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”

– G.K. Chesterton –

The sun would rise. And the sun would set: the last pink ribbon of dusk conceding to the inky dark of night. And they waited. They waited in their grief. They waited in their shock. They waited in the numb of their emptiness and pain and disbelief. Was it all over? Was it all gone?

They waited. And they remembered. They remembered the lakeside where He’d taught and laughed and healed. They remembered the storms He’d calmed and the crowds He’d fed. They remembered His gentleness and His power, His wisdom and His words.

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And they remembered the cross: the cruelty and the pain. They remembered the crown and the nails and the spear – how blood and water came mingled down. They remembered the quake, the darkness, the veil. They remembered it all – how He had loved and how they had run.

It was unbearable. It is unbearable: waiting. It is one of the hardest – and most God-like – experiences of our faith: enduring the times in between. Enduring the times in between joy, enduring the times in between peace, enduring the times in between knowing and doing and being. Enduring those times when we can only wait – fearing that what is good, important and needed is slipping away. Enduring those times when we are accompanied only by our memories of what once was and of all that could’ve been.

All they could do was wait.

And remember.

And hope.

Like the broken-winged bird that still looks to the heavens and sings, they hoped. They hoped that His words might still be true; they hoped that His promises might still be real – even from inside the grave. They hoped for one more miracle, for one more chance. They hoped for one more Hope. In the midst of all that was wasting and rotting within them, they clung to the hope that Life might still stir from death, to the hope that

111 Light might still be born from darkness. It had happened in the beginning; surely, it could happen again.

They waited and they hoped – trusting that God tarried just beyond their sight.

And so do we – abandoning all that would fetter us to the earth: all the fear, all the guilt, all the shame, all the brokenness, all the pain, and all the rot. We abandon all that would separate us from the One who died that we might live. We abandon them, waiting and hoping, for the life-changing, life-giving harvest of Christ.