By the Way: Lent offers feeling of renewal and deepened faith

By Kristy Reimers-Loader on April 6, 2019.

Lent. Every year, as I prepare for the liturgical season of Lent, I hope that it will be a time of devotion, prayer, and serene anticipation of Easter, that most glorious of Christian festivals. I pray that the weeks of Lent will be for me a time of holy reflection upon the gracious gift of Christ’s salvation, a time of penitence and resolution to be, and do better as a follower of Christ.

It rarely works out that way, friends.

Invariably, I get a rotten cold in Lent and I spend a significant portion of my time bemoaning and bewailing my weakened condition, not to mention questioning the Lord’s wisdom in allowing the cold virus to flourish in Creation.

And yet, I always emerge from Lent feeling renewed and deepened in my faith.

The very temporary nature of my own human suffering is always brought into sharp contrast with what Jesus went through in his passion and the crucifixion. The realization is like a bucket of ice-water to the face.

The difficult times in our lives offer an even greater opportunity for reflection on what must have been such a difficult time in Jesus’s human life as he approached his destiny in his death in Jerusalem at the hands of the chief priests and elders of the Temple, and Pontius Pilate, their political instrument.

To be reminded in our own suffering of what Jesus went through is to be reminded of who and what Jesus was-fully divine and fully human, and therefore the ultimate paradox-and that Jesus knows what it means to be one of us.

Jesus knows what it is to suffer the daily slings and arrows every human being has known in their lifetime, and more importantly, what it means to love other human beings to the point of making the ultimate sacrifice for their sake.

It is this knowledge within Jesus, and the compassion that flows from him through his knowing our pain that draws us to him and offers comfort unlike anything else we might encounter in the world.

It is our deep conviction that we are known and understood, that we are cherished, that we belong in the universe, that our suffering and our joy are both received with love by the One who will bring all things together and resolve all things in himself.

This is the ultimate experience of deep peace and lasting joy, even as we contemplate the price Jesus paid for it.