Congratulations on Your Lenten Failure!

Once again, I’ve been a bit too ambitious this Lent. Ash Wednesday, I resolved I would
1) go cold turkey on caffeine,
2) Piously study the Bible with my husband every night, and
3) put our family on a strict financial fast that prohibited any shopping (other than for groceries) and any eating out.

If you know me at all, you’re probably not surprised that one week into Lent, I’ve already slipped up at least once on all three of these disciplines! In the past, at the first sign of failure at my Lenten disciplines, I would throw up the white flag of defeat and then hang my head in shame. But not this year. This year I’m congratulating myself on my failure!

Let me explain. A spiritual discipline that I have been able to keep up with lately is mindfulness meditation, a form of prayer that I understand best when explained by Buddhist teachers. And in this discipline of mindfulness, you aim to clear your mind from all thoughts and simply experience the gift of the here and now. But mindfulness teachers say when you notice your mind wandering or daydreaming, you are supposed to congratulate yourself. Why? First, because recognizing that you have strayed is the first step to correcting the problem; it’s impossible to get back on the right path unless we first realize that we’ve strayed from it. And secondly, one must understand that deviating from the path of mindfulness is not a deviation from the practice of mindfulness; in fact, it is the very heart of the practice. Each time we deviate from the path, every time our mind begins to wander, we get one more golden opportunity to practice focusing, refocusing, and refocusing again our attention to where it belongs. That is practice.

So it is with our Lenten disciplines, or any Christian practice we aim to take up on our lifelong journey to the cross -- whether it be meditation, prayer, giving, fasting, acts of service, Bible study, worship, or the taking up of Christian virtues. We boldly set out determined to follow Jesus Christ, but we are clay-footed humans living East of Eden, and so we will always stray from the Way set before us. Recognizing we’ve failed to stick to the Way and getting ourselves back on track doesn’t mean we’ve failed God – quite the opposite! It is the heart of Christian discipline. It means we are alive in Christ and continuing to grow in our faithfulness.

So if you, like me, realize you have failed at your Lenten disciplines, congratulations!  Remember that what exactly your Lenten discipline is this year, or what Christian practices you’ve striven to take up throughout your life – what those activities actually are isn’t the point. Lenten disciplines aren't an end in themselves, and that what makes them different from New Year's resolutions. The point of Lent is not that I get off caffeine or that you stop facebooking three hours a day -- though those are all worthy endeavors!  The point is that we take up something that gives us the golden opportunity to practice focusing, and refocusing, and refocusing again our attention, our hearts, and our lives where they truly belong: with God.