Living Lent

Bread and Wine Reading: "Living Lent", by Barbara Cawthorne Crafton

Scripture Reading: Matthew 6: 19-21 Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Barbara Crafton begins her essay with the proclamation: “We didn’t even know what moderation was. What it felt like. We didn’t just work; we inhaled our jobs, sucked them in, became them. Stayed late, brought work home—it was never enough, though, no matter how much time we put in.” She goes on to portray aspects of a life with which all of us could identify—buying things we do not need, eating when we are full, and replacing furniture and household goods when they aren’t really worn out. We attribute it to “modern life”, to the benefits and perils of working hard, playing hard, and living a life trying to keep up with our own expectation and images of who we are.

What, then, is your treasure? What receives the highest priority in your life? What gets your attention, your money, your time? In what direction is your life moving?

I, admittedly, have a somewhat underdeveloped and sometimes non-existent sense of direction. Giving me directions by telling me to “go east and then go north and then go due west at the light” is worthless. My new car has a compass, a wonderful tool for the directionally-challenged such as myself. Even better, is the GPS on my Blackberry, with that kind woman giving you exact directions (regardless of the fact that she has apparently never driven in Houston on the week-ends that they close all the freeways at once!). But even compasses and GPS’s get “out of whack” at times, either because the batteries have been changed or because they, simply, have gotten shaken or discombobulated in some way. In essence, they lose their “true north”, the true sense of where they’re going and they then have to be recalibrated, a practice of finding the true north and once again knowing the direction to which they point.

Lent is a time of “recalibration” for us, a time of re-prioritizing, a time of refocusing on what is important, on what our “treasure” is in our life. Life is good, but sometimes it pulls us and shakes us and causes us to point to a place that is not the place we should be. This Lenten season is a way of resetting our own internal compass, that part of us that at the deepest level knows to what and to whom we are drawn. Lent calls us to recalibrate our lives that they might become a true way of “living lent”, of walking toward that which is the “true north”, the Way of Christ, the way to oneness with God.

Discussion Questions:
1.) What drives our needs to “have”, to “hold”, to “possess”, and to “do”? What gets in the way of our ability to “be”?
2.) What are some ways to “redirection” and “recalibrate” your life?
3.) Why is it so difficult for you to keep your priorities, your “treasure” straight in your own life?

So go forth toward a new direction that you might find the Way of Christ!

Grace and Peace,

Shelli