Lent offers space to explore the depths of our dustiness, the raw regrets, the sad sorrows, the bitter, brittle places where healing needs to visit my soul yet again.
We enter Lent within the safety of God’s great love for us. In this secure place, we experience His tender care when we reveal how confounded, befuddled, angered, and disgusted with ourselves we may feel. Yet this One who loves us doesn’t shake His head and dismiss us. Rather, He pursues us with affection. He wants to be with us as we examine the eroding spaces of our soul, our connection with ourselves, our people, our world, and, even with Him, our God.
Lent: Entering the Dust Within
We go to the crevices of loss in honest conversations with God. He is not threatened by our outpouring of questions, words that spew forth, riddled with angst and distress. In fact, He loves that we trust Him enough to reveal our hearts to Him.
As you journey through Lent, what will you explore? How will these explorations reveal where your heart is in your life’s journey?
I ask myself these same questions, hoping for a heart-deep sojourn as I explore Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness.
Yet I encounter a conundrum. Perhaps you do as well.
There’s a temptation that arises when I read the Temptations of Jesus.
I know the way to parse the words of Scripture. I imagine you do, too.
A commentary delves into the wheres and what-fors of every single line.
A word study divides and conquers the root meanings and origins: Hebrew and Greek.
A Bible map shows the location of a place and may give some sense of the terrain.
A concordance lists every place of usage in the Bible.
Over the past fifty-seven years, since I, as a sixteen-year-old, discovered the delight of knowing Jesus in April 1969, I’ve savored the Bible and soaked up Jesus’ love. As one who values Scripture, I’ve created outlines of chapters or books in the Bible. I’ve summarized themes. I’ve pored over and prayed through many of its topics. I’ve traced the strengths and weaknesses of real people who lived in Old and New Testament times.
These have been good, holy, wise places to dwell, vital to growing in knowledge of the Bible itself and in relationship with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Surely there is a time and a place to use our minds to study and grow as students of the Word. An inquisitive mind, exciting insights, and a new perspective on the words on the page reveal both words and the Word Himself. It’s informational. It gives us ways of understanding.
The Subtle Distance: When Knowledge Keeps Me Safe
And yet, it’s the strangest thing. All these ways can also be ways to keep my distance from God. Staying in information alone, only my head, curtails relational experiences. It can ensure the distance between my head and my heart remains separate.
The heart?
That’s risky business.
To experience an encounter with the Living God?
Oh, my.
I long for deep, continual intimacy with Jesus. To experience delight, discussions, and shared disappointments. To hear His specific words to my heart. Yet, that’s scary to do. Ten thousand what-ifs erupt when I consider drawing truly close to the Living God.
Stepping into the Story: Meeting Jesus in the Wilderness
In Imaginative Prayer, I tiptoe into scenes in Scripture. My head, my heart, and my body get involved as I let my five senses create a fuller picture of what the moment holds. Emotions, too, pull me into the Story.
I feel the brush of sand as it skims my feet when Jesus and I walk along the shoreline of the Sea of Galilee together. Overhead, shorebirds squawk, fishing as the tide ebbs and flows.
He turns, asks a question, and I ponder how to answer.
I’m not reading about Jesus.
I’m with Jesus.
This is what I want to be true between us all the time.
I want an intimately woven, forever close, with-God life.
When I bravely show up on the shore of my longings, Jesus and I together in my sacred imagination, there’s space to welcome emotions, questions, even places of inner resistance.
-
- What if the wheres and what fors of my story are held amid shoreside conversations with Jesus?
- What if together He and I divide and conquer the root meanings and origins of how I have come to be who I am?
- What if this way of entering the Story involves exploring the geography of my heart’s terrain?
Take this Lenten space of considering the temptations of Jesus, for instance. It’s far easier to observe at a distance what temptations are, what Jesus is up to in the desert. I know the reasons He’s come to earth. He’s come to make a way back home from all of this fallenness. I grasp there is an enemy with whom He battles on my behalf. I acknowledge He’s tempted. I can find the verses if you’d like me to.
Yes, I could study the number forty,
Forty being significant in Scripture.
Noah and the forty-day flood.
Moses on Mt. Sinai for forty days.
Elijah fasts for forty days.
Goliath taunts the Israelites for forty days.
Ezekiel lies on his right side for forty days.
Now, Jesus, forty days in the desert.
I could systematically study the parallels between
Adam and Eve in the Garden
and
Jesus, the New Adam in the Desert Wilderness.
I could compare the temptations for each setting:
Food and longings
Testing God
Worshipping Who?
That’s all well and fine, and don’t get me wrong, it’s important to do. We are called to use our minds in the exploration of the Word of God.
Yet
When I step into the fierce desert wind,
When I watch His face, with sweat dripping down,
When I see how His body struggles to stay upright,
When I see Him doubled over from fasting
Here in the heat of the day and the cold of the night in the desert wilderness,
When I hear the nuances of the conversation between Jesus and Satan,
I encounter Jesus in His fullness, hungry and tempted.
Emotions arise because I feel something toward Jesus.
I want this to be easier for Him.
I long to offer words of comfort.
And I find tears welling up in my eyes.
How much He must love me to endure so much for me!
I begin to experience a deeper connection when He wrestles, as I do. He’s not only words on the page, a prophecy and a promise fulfilled.
Jesus inhales
the dry dust of the desert
for me,
the dust-made one whom He clearly adores,
cares enough to go to battle for,
Here, in the piercing heat
Of temptation.
The Lenten Invitation: Living Heart-Side with Jesus
At times, the temptation is to stay only in my head, keeping my distance from His struggles and mine.
Yet, here in Lent,
Fasting takes me heart-side.
Confession takes me heart-side.
Imaginative prayer takes me heart-side.
And isn’t this
the invitation I most desire?
To come along heart-side with Jesus?
It is in the heart
that I experience
the intimate ways of the two of us,
Jesus and me,
in the desert of His temptations and mine.
Lord Jesus,
expand my heart
in this time of drawing in close
to Your heart in Lent.
Invite me yet deeper into holy intimacy with You.
Amen.
Your Lent Journey into the Wilderness
How will you enter your Lenten journey with Jesus?
What would it be like to allow Imaginative Prayer to give space for your love of Scripture to come alive in sacred, holy, playful, creative ways over the next six weeks of Lent?
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This year, I am offering Scriptures and quotes each day to help you trace your heart and the heart of Jesus in the days ahead. These will be posted on Instagram, Facebook, and Substack. I invite you to follow along on one of these platforms.
For paid Substack subscribers, I will be offering my Lenten resource, Jesus in the Wilderness, each week to guide you even deeper, as well as my Stations of the Cross resource for Holy Week. If you are not a paid Substack subscriber, you can purchase either of these Lent resources on my website:
I hope you engage and discover anew how beloved you are as you ponder the depths of love Jesus ventured into for your beautiful heart.
