When I first came to Tarime I was slightly surprised that
Tanzanian civil engineers would dig such shallow drainage ditches for their
roads. We came right at the end of rainy season, so it was still raining almost
daily for the first little bit of our time here and water was constantly in the
streets because the drainage ditches they had dug were just too shallow. A few
weeks after rainy season I noticed some people digging deeper drainage ditches and
I was glad that they were going to fix this mistake. When they finished digging
the drainage ditches I realized that I had been wrong. They had not built
shallow drainage ditches and the people had not been digging deeper ditches.
They were shoveling out all of the mud, dirt, trash, and other things that had
found their way into the ditches during the rainy season. They had nice deep,
stone lined drainage ditches that had been filled with all kinds of things
throughout the rainy season, until they could no longer do their job of moving
water along, but instead were filling the streets with water.
In many ways I feel like this is how my life has been
lately. I hate to admit it, but there are times when I feel so full of
dissatisfaction, when I feel like I am spending too much time hanging on to
things that other people have done to me, that I am always looking for a
greener pasture and calling it progress. My life can become so filled up with
things not of God that I cannot receive His grace and channel it to the people
he has directed me to serve.
Lent is a good time to stop that kind of behavior. One of
the traditions that we pull from for the period of Lent is the Jewish tradition
of mourning and repentance. Ash Wednesday comes from the practice of sitting on
ashes as a sign of mourning or of repentance (mourning a sin done against God).
In the book of Joel the prophet calls for a community fasting, asking for even
still nursing babies to come. He does this because Israel had fallen away from
God. They had filled their lives with so many things not of God that they
needed to be called to repent, to mourn, and to enter again into relationship
with God. They needed to clean out the “other” in their life and return to the
one who matters. I am experiencing a call right now to clean these things out
of my life and return to the call that God has given me and even more
importantly return to the one who called me. Because when our pathways to God
are filled up with anger, regret, jealousy, busyness…you name it, we cannot receive
from God what we need, and we certainly don’t have anything of worth to pass on
to others. We are just spewing out whatever is already inside of us.
I would like to challenge you to use this Lenten season to
dig. Take whatever is clogging up your relationship with God whether it is your
own feelings or your lack of time with God, and dig it out during this Lenten
season. Get it out of your life and replace it with God, His teachings, and His
work in your life. This morning during the Catholic mass I attended for Ash
Wednesday they focused on two aspects, acts of repentance and acts of charity.
We have this Lenten season to attend to both acts of repentance for the things
that have filled up our lives instead of God. We also have a chance for acts of
charity so that as we empty our lives of the things not of God, we can fill
them up with the things that are of God.
My plan is to give up (turn away from) the grudges that are
holding me back from the love of Christ God has given me for other people. I am
also hoping to put aside my work more often and focus on the people around me.
These two things, an act of repentance and an act of charity, that I hope will
clean out my spirit and prepare me for the glorious celebration of God’s
salvation entering the world. That these 40 days can be used to renew my
relationship with God since nothing else can better help us live the abundant
life that is salvation.
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