Where Your Love Poured Out (A Pre-Lenten Lenten Reflection)

Friends, the joy set before us is nearing soon, Lent in its glorious waiting, its humble spring heart cleaning. I hope that I will be able on this blog to offer some non-theological theological reflections on the season of Lent, as we near the preparing.

A week of quiet hard moments, I think. A week of barely here, trying to cling to presence and longing for another place, another future. I have wanted to be older this week, graduated, settled into the adventure of life (as if, for some strange reason, I don't think of myself as currently on it). A quiet week of hard moments. A hard week of quiet moments. All of them true, these variations on a sentence by Hilary. Sometimes when I write I feel like Mozart at his piano, fingers flying across those smooth keys and the sound birthed into the air. I wonder what my words sound like out loud? If it would be different read in my voice, if you could hear the Weepies' soundtrack in the background. But I digress, into this small reflection on Lent preparing, on the quiet week, the hard moments...

(Photo Credit: Mandie Sodoma)

but that utmost, ever present gentleness of God. How careful He is with me. How He does not give me more than I can bear. 

Last Sunday I was in Catacombs, listening to the song, "Lead Me to the Cross."

I wanted a song that would make me, you know, FEEL something really good about God. I have been feeling distant from him since last Wednesday, my questions firing up to heaven in every conceivable direction and my feet stamping obstinately, angrily at what I see Him doing. At the hard quiet moments when I ask and I do not hear, or I hear silence, or I hear, Follow me and I don't know where that goes, and what that means, and stubbornly I demand more, the detailed description, the game plan.

And the Spirit speaks slow and clear and amid the pounding djembe and the voices running up and down ladders of notes and harmonies. Feeling good? What is that to you? Follow me. The question leaves my heart reluctantly, glancing back every second or so to make sure I really want something other than feeling.

He nudges it out the door and shuts the questions away. I belong to Him. I belong to Him. When I want to encounter Jesus, the Christ, the Son of the Living God, whose name means The LORD saves - the way is marked.

Go to the Cross.

Go to Redemption's hill. Go to where Love is poured out. Just go, go running like I ran this afternoon, feet flying over the six week old snow, crystallized into tiny mountains of ice and dirt. Go running forward, sprint up that last hill because what else can we do? It is in our our skin cells, bone marrow, in the heaving of our out-of-breath lungs. We are built to breathe with Him, live with God alive and hammering away in our hearts.

Go with me, this Lent? Pull on running shoes and go leaping dashing racing forward, to the place where we collapse on our knees, to the Cross, where the Love pours out.

Love,

(Photo Credit: Hannah Cochran)

Hilary