Lent is: admitting need.

Oh how I need you

to refresh me:

body-soul-spirit.

Apart from you

I’m nothing:

a disciple-discontent.

Sad and downcast

Slow to learn:

slower still to act.

Oh how I need you

to just be here:

with me.

It's 11 AM and I'm back in bed, exhausted, restless, and hurting. My body is burnt out, and my mind can't keep up with the demands and the desires that I'm holding with wide open hands—yet still feel like I'm clinging, clenching, holding my breath for the next thing. 

I close my eyes and I listen to a friend talk about Lent and the interesting turn of events that is coinciding in her life with its onset. A few tears escape as I realize what He's trying to do with all of this pain: He's trying to enable me to admit my need. Again. 

Overseas in this series of seasons I’ve lived and moved in, I have, for the most part, been healthier than ever. I've had more energy, more ability, more passion behind my beating heart. But as 2017 began, 5 years after a undiagnosed illness left me in bed for months on end, all those same symptoms have crept up again. I'm tired, I don't have an appetite, I can't focus. 

And yet. And yet. 

I'm here. For five or so more months, I'm here. And, boy, do I have a lot to do: a lot I want to do. And He's giving me the strength to do it. But some mornings, He also just gives me the time to lay back down. To settle my thoughts on truth, and to curl up with grace who strokes my hair and says that this, child, this place right here, is exactly what Lent is about. 

Lent is admitting your need. It's admitting you can't do it and giving yourself the grace to see that when you can't, He can. It's knowing your limits, your brokenness, your sin—and it's asking Him to redeem each and every piece of you, again. Not just so that you can be whole. Definitely not so that you can regain your sense of control. So that others too can be renewed, too, as they see him in you. Even in those places where redemption is still in transit. 

Lent is the journey both of & towards redemption: it's here, now, ours for the having, but it's also ahead of us—our purpose, our goal not to make ourselves ready for but to find that He is ready, at the right time, to meet us in our admitted needs and to fill us up, body, soul, and spirit:to satisfy us with steadfast love that reminds us that He never gave up—so neither, then, should we. 

So I turned over in bed & wrote these words. I got up and did some yoga and got some to-dos done. This is where admitting our need sets us to work: refusing to allow ourselves only the space to realize our need; instead, also inviting Him in to meet our every need.

bonus: a poem: