Lent is....

Lent is… letting God defragmenting your hard drive.

At the beginning of Lent, I usually have the best of intentions. I don’t normally give something up, but I try to add something to my devotional live. This year it was a nice resource put out by Augsburg Fortress, a little devotional on Romans that fits in your pocket. And, like most years, my use of it has been hit or miss.

But that’s ok. Because Lent is like letting God defragment your hard drive.

When my seminary Luther tweeted “Lent is….”, encouraging people to fill in the blank, I thought I was pretty clever at coming up with this one. I didn’t expect that God would actually listen to me and make me eat my words this Lent.

Defragmenting a hard drive, if you recall, is the process of getting rid of the unnecessary junk in your computer and rearranging the programs to fill in the gaps more neatly, kind of like arranging your bookshelves by height and size so that they fit better. Now when we defragment computers it takes an hour or two, maybe more if it’s been a while. Beau once told me that he defragmented his computer way back when, and it took it an entire week. AN ENTIRE WEEK. Seven days of defragmenting. Can you imagine? What would we do nowadays without a computer for an entire week??? Thank goodness the process is sooo much faster now!

But defragmenting life is still a much longer process. And letting God defragment your personal hard drive takes an entire Lent, if not longer. For the past few weeks, and really for the last five months since moving to Trenton, God has been trying to teach me what is really necessary and what things might fit better in my life if rearranged a bit. Sometimes I’m a good student, sometimes I’m not. But I’m still learning a lot. I’m learning that it is possible to be a one car family even with both of our crazy schedules. I’m learning that a few sewing skills and some creativity can go a long way when it comes to saving money. I’m learning that when God rips down the detailed map of where you thought your life would go, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a whole wide universe behind it.

But that’s pretty much Lent in a nutshell. God taking our fragments and putting them back together to make a whole that is much better than the cobbled-together mess we’ve come up with; God making something beautiful out of the mess. 

This liturgical art is made from sea glass and broken IKEA plates, reconstructed and used at "Baby Pastor School"