I have been practicing Lent for the past several weeks, and I am yearning for Easter!

The Lent season seems to heighten my awareness of social media/screen time habits and weird dependence on Instagram and Words with Friends. Laying down habits like these for forty days does not trivialize Lent, but instead serves to alert us. Often the most trivial or mundane things steal our time or awaken in us comparison, jealousy, or sadness. 

Lent signals us to lay it down, to fast from whatever robs us of time for reflection and quiet. It reminds me at least that I can live without social media, and might even be better without it.

The Lenten season also urges us to take a breath, a personal inventory, to reflect on the anger or jealousy that seems to rise from inside so easily, or to address that overwhelming sense of fear or anxiety and lay it at the feet of Jesus. It gives us time to sort it out through prayer, or take a step to tell someone, or even make room to seek professional help.

With the utmost humility we remember that whatever we lay down isn’t what keeps us clean or right with God, Lent isn’t meant to be a season of chastisement...but instead, a season to remember why God sent his Son, His only Son, to live and die for us at the pleasure of the Father. Lent reminds us that Jesus did what we can never do—he lived the perfect life in our place.

Ultimately, Lent helps us to rethink, rediscover, and reimagine the incredible fact that we’re part of the bigger story, which is in fact, the true story of the whole world. It’s not just one of many religious stories, it’s not even the best religious story, it really is the true story of the whole world. We need help remembering that we live in God’s kingdom over which Jesus resides as King.

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. 

He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. 

For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. (Col. 1:15–21)