re-inventions of lent

In stark contrast to my usual experience, this year I was not only aware of lent, but I took part in it. A significant influence was my leadership involvement with our lent and easter celebrations at church. I find when I lead things I do it with more justice, humility and surrender if I am personal involved on some personal level. My experience this year for lent was a rich one. It was a memorable journey for me.

Lent means spring, as I only became aware of this year. And it seems quite fitting for me to consider spring this year, as it's the first year in some five years that I have truly witnessed the distinct changing of seasons with the anticipation that I did this year. This spring I watched the snow melt, and the rain water the grass, and then as the conditions became just so appropriate, the world around me came to life. It's a beatuiful thing waking up and hardly recognizing the surrounding area in the dawn's early light on account of it being a shade of green it has not yet been for a year.

Living here at home has granted me the opportuinity to find life in ways that I had forgotten it existed, and with mixed emotions I prepare myself to leave once again. Tomorrow I will leave this place, yet I feel as though I am a new person leaving an old place. I have found rest and life and home, all of which I cannot aptly articulate. It has been one of the best times of my life, as I look back, and look ahead and was really quite content to just breathe where I found myself.

I was surprised time and time again by the things I discovered. While holding my breath looking in one direction with confidence I would get the wind knocked out of me and end up looking in the other. Doors that I thought were open appeared to be closed, only to reveal several more that were open for me to choose from. People whom I thought would always be there for me have disappointed me, while others whom I would never have thought to connect with have been sources of deeply routed and growing friendship. Some distances that are phsycially small have felt vast, while others that should likely feel vast have felt intimately close. I have realized I'm still an adolenscent in a lot of ways, yet I've grown and matured in many more. I'm scared and I'm bold all at the same time. I really like my family, and when I grow up I want to be like them, and for the mean time it's going to be really hard to leave them again. But this time, this short encounter on my life's story has been one of the best I can ever recall.

This season of my life has felt like I'm coming to life in the spring, it's been a time of re-inventing on many levels.