“It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”
Galatians 2:20

 “A man prayed, and at first he thought that prayer was talking.  But he became more and more quiet until in the end he realized that prayer is listening.”
Søren Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses

I’m just now fully waking up to the fact that – suddenly – Lent is less than two weeks away!  The starkness of the desert, where we’re beckoned to spend 40 days with Jesus, is just over the next ridge in our journey together.

Though the pandemic has already felt like a desert in many ways, take a moment and ask yourself:  

How do you typically prepare when you see a challenging season up ahead?  
When things are calm now, but something intense (whether good or bad) is about to stretch you to your limits? 
When you aren’t being tempted now, but you know temptation will be all around you before long?

Some of us preemptively move into overdrive– planning for every possible contingency, flattening the present into a boot camp for the future, hoarding those essentials and comforts that we desperately hope will make the challenging season a bit more bearable.  Fearful of future pain and lack of control, we work ourselves up into a constant hum of anxiety that makes it hard to hear God—to be present to our God whose presence is wholeness and peace.

Others of us tend toward the opposite extreme– choosing not to think about the coming season until the last possible moment.  Fearful of losing space for spontaneity now, we busy ourselves with things that feel more immediately rewarding, avoiding emotions intense enough to move us toward a focused course of action.  While this avoidance preserves a surface-level serenity, it also prevents us from being fully present with God, who so often calls us outside our comfort zones and promises to be present there too.

Friends, first, hear good news: 

Toward whichever preparation extreme we tend, Jesus is with us.  In our preparation, and in our deserts.  Nothing we do, or don’t do, can ever change that.

Often, it’s in the desert that God gets our full attention.  Everything else has either been stripped away or will soon become so overwhelming that we can’t help but turn to God in desperation.  But we don’t have to wait for that.  God is always present with us:  after all, it’s no longer even we who live, but Christ who lives in us! 

So how might God be inviting you to give Jesus your full attention now, though the Lenten desert is still to come?  How might simply being with Jesus become the focus of your preparation?

Let’s join our journeys, now and as we cross into the desert.