Love and God and Lent

Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.
Where there is hatred . . . let me sow love
Where there is injury . . . pardon
Where there is doubt . . . faith
Where there is despair . . . hope
Where there is darkness . . . light
Where there is sadness . . . joy
O, Divine Master,
Grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled . . . as to console
To be understood . . . as to understand,
To be loved . . . as to love
For it is in giving . . . that we receive,
It is in pardoning, that we are pardoned,
It is in dying . . . that we are born to eternal life.

St. Francis of Assissi


We don't celebrate Lent at our church. But this year I wanted to. I'm not really sure why. I didn't even really know what Lent was - I just knew that people gave up sweets or meat or TV or some luxery for a period of time before Easter. So I gave up coffee. And I decided to get a Lenten devotional from the library, just in case I was missing out on some aspect of it that I didn't know about.

Earlier this year, I had been dwelling on the verses in Matthew about not worrying, and the next verse that says "Seek first the Kingdom of Heaven, and all these things [your daily needs] will be added unto you" I spent a while trying to figure out exactly what it meant to 'seek the kingdom' and how to do that; but after a while it slipped my mind and I got busy with other things.

So then Lent started, and I started this wonderful devotional - it really helped me remember the very most basics of Christianity - God's grace and our need for Him. It seemed that each day's reading pertained directly with what was going on in my life that day or week. It's really a blessing.

This past weekend, Brent and I drove to Pennslylvania to his grandfather's funeral. It was about 9 hours in the car, and there was a book I wanted Brent and I to read, so I bought it on iTunes and we listened to it all the way home. The Irrisistable Revolution: Living Life as an Ordinary Radical by Shane Claiborne
I know the book has nothing to do with Lent, but it fit so well with everything that has been going through my head in the past months. If I had to sum up the book very quickly, I would say that it's about how Christians need to get back to the root of Christ and learn again how to really love one another - no matter who they are. It was a challenging book. I'd like to listen to it again and write more about it later, but the quote at the top of this post sums it up well. I've been looking at everyone I see and asking myself how I can love them more and show Christ to them.

Today my Lenten devotion was about becoming imitations of Christ - and what did Christ do better than love?