Are We Ready to Give Up Till It Hurts?

I am relaxing after a long, strenuous hike in the snow at Valley Forge park this afternoon. It was inspiring to get out of the house and into the sunshine and scenery and get the heart pumping for about 3 1/2 hours. Now I have various aches and pains and stiffness, of course, but it was well worth it for the psychological and cardiovascular benefits, and for how good dinner tasted after all that exercise. And those benefits are what I kept remembering those last few miles before we got back to the car. I felt a little like a winter Olympian!

As we have all experienced, we know that working towards a worthwhile goal can sometimes be difficult--we get tempted to lose our focus and rest too early, preventing ourselves from succeeding.

This morning the choir sang about the "Garden of Gethsemane" in keeping with the theme of the day, the first Sunday of the Lenten season. The sermon dealt with the temptations Satan presented to Jesus as recounted in scripture during his 40 days of fasting in the wilderness. The devil shrewdly presented Jesus with choices that sounded as though they could be justified as being in keeping with his ministry, but Jesus was able to be unswayed, and discern what was actually the better course.

I haven't quite figured out what to "give up" for Lent. If you were to ask my husband what I should give up, it wouldn't be anything normal like giving up candy or movies, he would probably tell you I need to give up "beating up on myself" or "setting up unrealistic expectations." (Being married, and especially, as in my case, married to a therapist, we are prone to get exposed to insightful observations that remind use how we can be completely blind to things that are quite obvious to others who are close to us!) These types of ingrained personal patterns are extremely hard to "give up" because they are part of our core personality--and it can really hurt when we look at them.

What does Jesus want us to give up for Lent? Would he be more pleased with me if I stopped eating chocolate, or if I somehow stopped obsessing over small issues of office politics at work? If I stopped watching a favorite TV show, or if I miraculously stopped feeling disproportionately inadequate as the result of a small careless comment somebody made? Well, when we work on ourselves, there is the easy, surface stuff, and then there is the hard work, the work that makes us 'sweat' because we are really stretching and challenging ourselves. Jesus asks a lot of us, but only because he wants us to have the greater rewards that await us if we are able to keep ourselves on the straight and narrow.

God bless you this Lenten season as you do the hard work and look forward to the rewards of spring and new life!