Give up and Get
This Lent, I’m trying to simplify. The idea that simplifying can bring us closer to God is fairly easy to get behind. But the application is pretty difficult. Near impossible. How do we simplify when the world constantly demands the opposite? When it tells us that to be successful we must pack our schedules to the max, up our spending, fill our homes with more and more stuff, and do or be any number of competing personas all at once? That’s why I love the season of Lent. It’s meant to be a time of internal renewal away from all the external pressures. For forty days, the church tries to set aside that time that the world refuses to give us, the kind we so desperately need. In ancient traditions, Lent was a forty-day period of time before Easter when those who wanted to become baptized Christians learned about the faith they wanted to profess—Jesus’s life, his death and resurrection, and the beliefs and practices of the early church. It was also a time when baptized Christian