A daily Lenten e-mail with lessons of hope and courage, inspired by a variety of resources to encourage us in these confusing and turbulent times from St. Luke’s Church, Lebanon.
Thursday after Ash Wednesday
Realizing you have really lost something sends a shock through your whole system. Often you feel a pang of grief and then anger and possibly confusion. Perhaps it was something so small as your car keys, or maybe your cell phone. It might be as significant as someone whom you love. The intensity and duration of the shock will differ but the immediate resistance you feel to losing what you (think) you possess is built into the human psyche. But then, finding what we lost fills us with a degree of joy and gratitude comparable to the degree of loss. That which we thought we had lost returns - this time as a gift. Interestingly, whenever we experience giving (from or to ourselves) we become more alive, more generous and more our real selves. Life teaches us this truth about finding and losing anyway. But we can also apply the truth and to some degree pre-empt the pain and shock of losing. The more It’s called letting go. The more attached and possessive, the worse the pain of loss. Letting go is a kind of voluntary losing – a paradox that transform loss into finding.
Lent - and whatever simple discipline of self-control we undertake during the next 40 days - can teach us how to let go at every moment, with every breath, every meeting, in every relationship. It can empower us to live with freedom and spontaneity and ultimately lead us into a fearlessness that permits our full humanity to flower. We just have to trust and leap. “Anyone who wants to save his life will lose it.” We do this by degrees – the gentle shift of direction that our daily disciplines can make actually make this happen.
Lose your life. . .
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