Lent is sneaking up on us!

During this morning's Today Show, which is where lots of my life epiphanies take place, I realized that Lent starts this week!  I have yet to decide if I'm going to observe it and how, and it should be a decision you think about for a little bit, so I was a little flustered.  Then, there was a blog post on the observation of Lent waiting for me in my reader, and just now a friend texted to ask if and how I was observing Lent.  Is God telling me something???  Hmm....

I did appreciate this blog's consideration of Lent observation and I recommend it if you're in the boat with me.  Anticipating Easter, Lent, and Sweet Potato Biscuits

I particularly appreciated this Buechner excerpt because I graduated from Belmont and I can't help myself:

Fredrick Buechner, a favorite author of mine, beautifully explains the season of Lent from his perspective in his book, Whistling in the Dark:



In many cultures there is an ancient custom of giving a tenth of each year’s income to some holy use. For Christians, to observe forty days of Lent is to do the same thing with roughly a tenth of each year’s days. After being baptized by John in the river Jordan, Jesus went off alone into the wilderness where he spent forty days asking himself the question what it meant to be Jesus. During Lent, Christians are supposed to ask one way or another what it means to be themselves.


If you had to bet everything you have on whether there is a God or whether there isn’t, which side would get your money and why?


When you look at your face in the mirror, what do you see in it that you most like and what do you most deplore?


If you had only one last message to leave to the handful of people who are most important to you, what would it be in twenty-five words or less?


Of all the things you have done in your life, which is the one you would most like to undo? Which is the one that makes you happiest to remember?


Is there any person in the world, or any cause, that, if circumstances called for it, you would be willing to die for?


If this were the last day of your life, what would you do with it?


To hear yourself try to answer questions like these is to begin to hear something not only of who you are but of both what you are becoming and what you are failing to become. It can be a pretty depressing business all in all, but if sackcloth and ashes are at the start of it, something like Easter may be at the end.