Lent: Broken but Chosen

I decided not to give anything up for lent this year.

In the past, I’ve picked something like sweets or shopping to ditch…something that will ultimately benefit my health or wealth. Let’s be real, I 100% missed the point.

This year I decided to reflect instead. Rather than giving something up, I realized that there was a lot of perspective that I stood to gain.

Since the last Easter season, a lot has happened. Put bluntly, I have come to know more deeply what it’s like to be broken in a broken world.

Health wise, I am intimately aware of my physical limitations. I am a person whose ability to walk normally and tolerate day to day activity depends on ridiculously expensive drugs. New symptoms are no longer novel (?) or as scary because pain and uncertainty are…normal. I’ve come to really know this reality, to accept it.

Heart wise, I know what it feels like to break, to feel fully known but not enough. I have sat with the fullness of feeling rejected, crippled by my contributions not outweighing my costs. There’s a true acknowledgement of internal helplessness and brokenness when your heart is in pieces but you are entirely incapable of putting it back together.

And now I get lent, and I am thankful for it.

I know what it’s like to lose. To lose out on the physical lottery, to hurt deeply and not know how to heal. I have felt my brokenness in a real and raw way, and experienced an inability to fix myself.

That’s why the ashes are so meaningful – they are lifeless and hopeless, what remains after a burn; fragments so marred that recovery is not comprehensible.

Spoiler alert! The beauty in the ashes part.

Christ sees our brokenness, my brokenness. He knows what I have lost – and that I am a loser. He knows that I have caused pain and that I have felt pain. He sees my pieces, disjointed and deformed – broken beyond my own repair.

Yet he chose me, and he chooses me. Not because I am worthy, but because of love.

Choosing someone entirely broken is, I think, the most beautiful concept that I can fathom. It’s the most beautiful truth I have known. Loved… through the failure that I have been and will be.

It’s an unbalanced equation. And it doesn’t make sense.

Side note: not only is Easter about Christ choosing us, it’s about him sitting in the ashes with us. He broke, felt the pain of rejection, and knows what it’s like to lose.

This Lent season has been more beautiful than I could have imagined.

With confidence I can say that I am broken – I know this. This past year has exposed weakness and rejection in a full way. But with the same breath I know that I am chosen. I know that, out of the truest love, He picked up the ashes and breathed life into my soul.

That’s a ridiculous kind of love. So, thanks, Lent! 28 years of reformed theology, and I think I *finally* get you 😉