A journey of exploration

Just a few days in and I am already feeling that this is going to be an exciting journey, partly because I don’t where it is going to take me. I woke up this morning with yesterday’s question in my mind – how do you do Lent when you are already at Easter? As I have worked through the day the word that God gave me was “context”.

I realised that there is a much wider context to Easter day than just living as resurrection people and we might just have to take ourselves out of that place to understand the context.

How did I get there? Well tomorrow morning I will be leading a family service on Noah, for a number of random reasons. Once the character was set I realised that here was another person who traditionally spent 40 days in the wilderness. As I picked apart this classic passage on the first Sunday of Lent it reminded me that I regularly tell my churches that we cannot ignore the Old Testament, it is a significant part of the context we use to read the New Testament.

Similarly, if I just live on Easter day all year round and ignore the journey of Lent then it is just as bad as only reading the New Testament - I miss the significant context within which Easter day is set.

Sometimes it is nice knowing what you need to do but hard when you don’t know how on earth you are going to do it. My struggle with lent is not ideal, I need to come out of a year long Easter Day and truly embrace the journey of lent. How I am going to do that is for the next leg of the journey – I may just manage it by Good Friday.