During Lent make room for something new from God

Lent lasted two years for me once.

I was in my early thirties and coming through a painful divorce. I moved five times during those years.

The first move was brutal- leaving behind or tossing away many possessions that had held precious meaning. Photos, funny videos and mix tapes from college days, skis and snow boots from vacations with mutual friends, left over Valentine’s boxes stuck between dried roses.

Abandoned, left, gone.

I moved out of our house and into a tiny apartment with a small creek nearby. I holed up and healed with lots of tears, prayer and solitude in nature. It certainly was my time in the desert, contemplating past and future.

The next moves came at the urging of friends—into community—in a new place across town. I could laugh and cry, drink coffee in the mornings and wine in the evenings with girlfriends who could relate through their own experiences as we lip-synced to Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive”, which became our informal anthem.

A year later, I made a final move across the state and over the mountains to Seattle, where I had a new teaching job and a new apartment. I didn’t know a soul except for my sister, but I had a whole city to explore and a new life to create. All my worldly possessions fit neatly into a small U-Haul because I’d done it so many times before. It made for fairly light travel across the mountain pass.

Like a snake shedding its skin, I grew more with each move and took less with me. I became more mobile and agile as I moved forward into a new life that God had in mind.

God called many of his prophets and disciples to leave old lives behind with little more than the clothes on their backs or the shoes on their feet. Jesus himself went into the desert with few possessions for 40 days to fast, pray and enter into contemplation about the new path his life was taking.

During Lent in the Catholic tradition, we are asked to divorce—to separate from—things we are connected to. These can be things in our lives that we may, in fact, love; to make way for something new. And it’s painful, letting go. Doing without. Weathering discomfort, stretching, and growing.

While I’m grateful for the 40 days of Lent, I’ve become keenly aware of how those Lenten seasons can sometimes play out in my life. What I didn’t know then was that there would be a new classroom full of kids to teach, a community of new friends—including a new best friend who would become my husband—waiting on the other side of those mountains.

When I turn around and look back, I can see how I couldn’t have reached higher ground without shedding the past and growing into a future that only God could see.