Lent: A Season of Mess and Hope

Our word “Lent” comes from the Old English lencten, which simply means springtime. And if you’ve lived through enough Wisconsin springs, you know springtime is a gloriously messy season — never quite sure if it will offer hopeful sunny days with dripping snowmelt or arctic blasts with ten more inches of snow. Spring doesn’t apologize for its contradictions. It holds grief and hope in the same gray sky.

We all know the very real grief that comes with late winter. The cold has overstayed its welcome.  The days are getting longer…but still feel too short.  At least we have had snow to cover up bare branches and brown grass, but we still ache for color. And yet — even right now today — the tulips are already pushing up beneath the snow whether we notice them or not. The birds have begun their long journeys home to us. Something is stirring that the cold cannot stop.

Spring is fitting for our Lenten journey of preparation for Easter. Lent doesn’t ask us to pretend winter is over before it is. It doesn’t rush us. Instead, Lent invites us to be right where we are, to name the grief we carry, and to feel the weight of all the losses that have accumulated.

And yet Lent also dares us to hope. Not a naive hope that pretends the cold isn’t real, but a stubborn hope that trusts that resurrection is coming even while standing at the tomb. The kind that sees the tulip pushing up through frozen ground and says, yes, something is stirring here.

The cross we journey toward in these weeks is not the end of the story. It never was. We walk through Lent not as people who don’t know how it ends, but as people who know exactly how it ends — and who are invited, year after year, to let that ending surprise us all over again with its joy.

So in this season, hold both. Hold the grief honestly — it is real and it is holy and God is not afraid of it. And hold the hope stubbornly — because the same God who calls the birds back north and coaxes tulips through frozen ground is not finished with us yet either.

Spring is coming. It always does.

– submitted by Rev. Tim Grade