Ash Wednesday

To say that I have nearly been home from Africa for a year seems strange.  The lessons and prayers and joy and wounds and of my time there are still fresh and close, but most days my heart holds them at a distance.  My heart seems to have grown impenetrably hard and calloused in certain places.  There have been times of deep depression, deep resentment, loneliness, anger, damaging bouts of nostalgia that found me trying to crawl myself back to “who I was then.”  The story of Jonah resonates deep in me these days.  Some days I am the grateful, worried man in the belly of a whale and some days I am the bitter, cursing man sunburned under a withered vine; some days I am the fugitive prophet drunk on self-pity, others I am the failed prophet full of self-hate.  Most days I am the man who hears the call of God, but has forgotten his own name.  It has been a year of feeling for my bootstraps to pull myself up, a year of trying to prove my worth outside of teaching and leading teams, fathering and feeding street kids.  I have been seldom on my knees outside of fits of confusion on long night drives or distracted prayers that just want a quick-fix or a good moment.  And the more people I meet and the more conversations I have – I don’t seem to be alone in these things.

But hope seems to be sprouting in spite of my stubbornness.  If I have learned anything from the last year it is that I really don’t have an ounce of hope outside of Jesus.  It has become clear that left to my own devices, I would spend the rest of my life drafting new ways to waste it.  But there has been a constant voice and constant grace fathering me along, and it has become equally clear that God is not about to let me go.

And so here we are at the edge of Lent – preparing to journey towards the cross of Jesus, to follow him into death towards a hope that nothing else has been able to provide.  Today begins a season of trying to let go of the things that keep me from God – the idols I’ve been clinging to that have only brought me death, all my false ideas about myself, all my terrible ideas about how things should be and who I should be, all of my people-pleasing and fear of rejection.

And underneath all of these is voice of the Father inviting us home;

Inviting us to return to him in the places where our hearts are hard and calloused;

Inviting us to take a look at the things in our hands and the things that cling to as if they could bring us life and to lay them down.

Maybe we’ve been trying to prove ourselves to Him in impossible ways, and he invites us to rest, tells us “It is finished.”

Maybe we have carried guilt or shame, or the marks of failure, and he is inviting us into his deep forgiveness.

Maybe we are using our hands to cover our deep wounds and withered hearts, but he reaches for those places to heal them and restore them.

And so we have these days, leading up to Easter, to take inventory, to let go, to turn around, to head home.  So we beg for the grace that will allow us to fix our eyes on Jesus – in the face of temptations that make us want to run back to old idols, in the face of the demons that would haunt us, in the face of our addictions that scream to be fed, and our desires that long for instant gratification.  We fill our time and our eyes with the things that remind us of Jesus and of the love of the father:

fasting to make space in our lives,

the scriptures,

the silent moments,

the early mornings,

the moments of confession and admitting we have been wrong,

the Lord’s prayer,

time with families and spouses,

time with the people that hold the gospel in our faces and grab us by the chin to pull our eyes towards Jesus,

time among the least of these,

And all the while our eyes are fixed on the horizon –
Our hearts are made ready to receive the love that is ahead in Easter, the love that is fully present now, the love that is our only hope, the love that makes space for new beginnings

Here’s hoping that in these days the voice of God becomes clearer, that our hands become emptier, that our hearts become softer, the Gospel becomes new, and that as we see the death and resurrection of Jesus we find our own.

Here’s hoping we stop keeping ourselves from furious love of God.