Lent

Preparing children for school, for a recital, for being a friend, for facing difficulties and a hundred other things is the job of a parent. It is not easy. When older people say to savor these moments, these are the best  years of your life, it occurs to me that they are perhaps allowing themselves to have a selective memory. There is a certain reward from the hard work of parenting, but it is just that, hard work. The lack of sleep, the stickiness, the limitation to your freedom of movement, literally and figuratively, are all difficult and exhausting. As children grow more independent and the limitations of raising children lift a little each year, it is a blessing. There is a happy reward in seeing the child, to whom you read Good Night Moon three times every night for a year, grow into a mature young adult. To see the girl, who insisted on wearing her socks inside out because the seam on the toe bothered her, appear each morning dressed and groomed beautifully for school without any fuss or even discussion. It takes time to see the results of parenting. It is a short time that seems very long.

Lent is very much like parenting in that way. It is only 40 days, not even a month and a half, and yet it can drag on and on. Forty days seems a very long time when you have committed to give something up or to take on a difficult task. Like parenting Lent is a way to prepare. If you are a parent, you are ready for Lent because you have been practicing preparing since the day you discovered you were to be a parent. 

Like parenting, Lent seems like a really good idea at first. We launch into Lent with the belief that we can go without chocolate for a mere six weeks; that we can memorize a new verse from the Bible each day for forty days; that we can be kinder or more gentle or healthier. Again like parenting, the great ideas wear thin after awhile. The going gets tougher. The sparkle of the new wears off and some days it is just hard, unrewarding work. Yet the reward does come. Just as recalcitrent toddlers slowly but surely turn into charming young adults, so too does the discipline of Lent turn into a joyful Easter. Lent's work makes Easter's joy more full, more real something to be cherished.

I hope each of us has the forethought to commit ourselves to a Lenten discipline and the dedication to continue that commitment to the end with the sure and certain hope that Easter will come and with it the blessing of the season.  

Blessings,

Michelle