What do you want to do with your one and only life? 

Be your true, authentic self!
Live from the centre of who you truly are! 

These kinds of over-sized enthusiastic questions and maxims are what greet people like me who live in the liminal space of trying to decide what to do next.

It’s a lot to manage.
It’s a lot to think about.
It is also essentially good advice.

Of course, it’s important to live an internally coherent life. Of course, it’s important to not accept Saul’s armour and instead face the battle using the tools God gave you in the way that God gave them to you to use.

Yes! I am not a mistake;
I am on purpose; God has a plan.

But in all honesty, for someone who has been raised in such an individualistic age, with such a deep sense of the importance of valuing the self, I find my true self somewhat hard to locate, let alone pin down and define. If you’ve met me, you know I’m not lacking in confidence. I don’t suffer from a lot of self-doubt. I’m not particularly afraid of being mistaken. I’ve been known, on occasion, to step up and take risks. So if all of this is true, then why, oh why, does it feel so hard to find and define me?

The power of Lent is that it begins with “remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.” Lent is a yearly opportunity to right size the self and start at the beginning. The annual act of giving something up for Lent invites us to ask, “What barnacles have I accumulated in the last year?”

What clouds my judgment?
What insulates me from reality?
What is occupying an outsized place in my life?
What is obscuring my connection to my creator?

Lent is about letting the air out of the Wacky Waving Inflatable Arm Flailing Tube Man of the self long enough to see Jesus again.

To be surprised by his quiet authenticity.
To be pulled along by his unclouded sense of self.

To be reminded that there are actual people who leave on time. Arrive on time. Do things in order. Resist temptation. Stay on track despite myriad temptations to go off track. To rediscover that there is such a thing as a life that fights the devil and comes out on top. 

I deeply long to be such a person.
I truly need to be such a person.
People close to me need this too.

And so, every year, I join my Christian community as we practice this key down beat in the yearly rhythm of our life together. Every year, we choose to recognize who we are, how far we still have to go, and to return to the source of the self, and once again fix our gaze on the Author and Perfecter of life. Handing ourselves over to God only to have ourselves returned to us; human-sized. 

The human-sized self is a beautiful place to begin asking, “What is mine to do?” To send out the question to God and have it answered with the easy yoke, the simple, the possible, the gentle, the hopeful, and the reasonable. It is the best place to find a safe and proper fitting burden to carry. One that only The someone who knit you together in your mother’s womb could offer you. 

Friend, if you are straining under the weight of ultimate questions like I have, join me and my community. 

Join us as we let the air out of our flailing lives.
Join us as we fix our gaze on a whole person.
Join us as we lay it all down and surrender.
Join us as we pick it all up again, new and improved, three days later.

Thank you for reading the New Leaf Lent Series, a collection of reflections from writers across Canada. If you are enjoying the reader, sign up to receive the readings in your inbox each day here: SIGN UP

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