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Lent
It is the season of Lent in the Christian church. This means Christians all over Middle Georgia and around the world have begun a season of self-examination and penitence — sometimes noted as we deprive ourselves of certain pleasures in order to center our lives on God more.
Some give up the pleasures of sweets or caffeine and others go as far as giving up the pleasure of gossiping or laziness in their prayer life. Somehow, these small habits are intended to make us more Christian by the end of the Lenten season on Easter Sunday.
I don’t know about you, but it might take a little more than giving up chocolate to make me a more faithful Christian.
What if instead of concentrating on small habits of depravation, we worried more about the ways we live our lives every day — the words we speak, the actions (or inactions) that consume our days, and the attitudes we carry with us?
For example, one might be led to believe that being a Christian means taking a hard stand on certain issues. One might even believe that being angry and drawing lines in the sand are the difference makers in their faith. If we could only get our stances and beliefs right, then we might be Christian.
But what if our anger, our stances and our rightness don’t make us more Christian? What if, in fact, they do the very opposite?
Jean Vanier, the founder of the L’Arche Communities, writes, “Love doesn’t mean doing extraordinary or heroic things. It means knowing how to do ordinary things with tenderness.”
What if learning the art of tenderness has more hope of making us more Christian than any of our stances and anger ever did? What if the way we go about being Christian were just as important (if not more) than what we said we believed in?
The Apostle Paul writes that we can have all the gifts of prophecy and understand all the mysteries and truths of the universe, we can have faith that moved mountains and we can even be right and win all of the arguments on social issues of the day, but if we don’t know how to love, then we are nothing at all.
And love is hard because it’s patient and kind; it’s not arrogant and it doesn’t seek to always be right. Love is characterized by the tenderness and humility we show when we live our daily lives as witnesses to the hope of our faith.
How do we talk about the events of our day or other people with a greater sense of love? How do we interact with others — especially those with whom we do not agree — with a greater sense of love? How do we see others and ourselves through the eyes of a loving God who relentlessly calls us to be new and better versions of ourselves?
I hope these are the questions we struggle with as we go without our desserts and coffee during the coming weeks. These are tough questions that demand deep answers. These are the true questions of Lent.
[The column originally ran in The Macon Telegraph on Sat. March 15, 2014]
The Rev. Ben Gosden is associate pastor of Mulberry Street United Methodist Church in Macon, Ga. He blogs at Covered in the Master's Dust.