Lent day 1: Ash Wednesday

Lent day 1: Ash Wednesday

I am gonna be honest. It has been a rough few years. Some really great things have happened. My kids are the coolest. My wife gets cooler all the time. I love my job. I am looking at getting trained in Spiritual Direction. Considering a PHD in peace studies.

But we have been dealing with COVID for some time. And the WAY in which people have chosen to deal with it, or rather to pretend it doesn't exist or isn't that bad, has been it's own sort of frustration. The death tolls are heavy. There have been shootings. A whole insurrection. Downplaying the insurrection. Wars. A possible European war is looming while folks in Ukraine try to resist a Russian invasion. 

My dad died a year ago this month. I watched my dad essentially starve to death over the course of a year with untreatable cancer. 

I think the season of Lent and Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, all of that, is a beautiful part of the church calendar. I love that the practice has evolved beyond the high liturgical church spaces into Baptist groups and non-denominational churches as well. It is a beautiful time for introspection into our own mortality. A wonderful self-examination of the role we play in the injustice we see in the world around us. To look at the log in our own eye. A stark reminder of the suffering of Jesus and the grace through which God sees us. 

But I am a bit done with reminders of death at the moment. People die by the thousands all around us. Some violently. Some cut off from loved ones in a pandemic. Some in the streets with no names or loved ones to care. Some get their faces painted in murals and given viral hashtags compelling us to fight and resist evil.

Some die in their own homes while their loved ones take care of them, leaving those loved ones broken and fractured.

I am sick and tired of ashes.

I want to say to Lent this year, "I get it. Enough." 

So yesterday, I decided to make a daily comic during the season of Lent. I am not fasting from anything. I am not reading anyone's Lent journals or signing up for their email devotional. 

I am just going to use this season to make some art. To reflect on what is beautiful in our state of impermanence. To reflect on the things that mock death by giving life. To reflect on the beautiful grace of Jesus amid ordinary, boring things like grading papers, watching Blippi for the thousandth time, packing lunches, mowing the grass, bragging about my Wordle guesses, and telling students to turn in their phones. 

So, in my non-denominational space, I am going to "mirth in the love of God" for Lent, as Richard Rolle said.

Feel free to read along.