What is Lent?

What is Lent? Lent Means Spring, and has come to mean the 40 days before Easter or the day we celebrate the Resurrection of Christ. t comes right after Carnival or Marti Gras… something that is so other than what it actually started out as.

So what’s the big deal about forty. Tessarakoste. Pentecoste We are taught to give a tenth of each year’s income to some holy use. For, Christians, to observe the forty days of Lent is to do the same thing with roughly a tenth of each years days. Not only that, it may perhaps mean that we give something up for Lent. And Perhaps add something as well. Lent is about fasting/giving something of ours up and giving it to someone else – like Jesus. Really its about trying to act more like Jesus. It’s a somber time. A reflective time. A time of mourning and recognizing who and what exactly we are. After all we are dust and to dust we shall return until the resurrection of our bodies.

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 it seems that Christians ought to be asking themselves in one way or another what it means to be ourselves.

–   What does it mean to say you’re a Christian, a Christ follower?

–   What does it mean to give something up, when the world seems to be saying get all you can?

• When you look at your face in the mirror, what do you see in it that you most like and what do you see in it that you most deplore?
• If you had only one message to leave to the handful of people who are most important to you, what would it be in twenty five words or less?
• 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.