Neon Bible: A Story About Lent
Forty days ago things were different. My heart was cold like too much winter. My days were selfish like too much free time. I was mad at God and the Church and everything I had ever shaped my life around. In many ways it felt as though things were breaking down; all the moving parts of my mind and heart didn’t work anymore. The synapses kept misfiring. My relationship with God felt similar to having a Russian pen pal without a translator or efficient postal service.
Naturally, with the given circumstances, I was unsure of how I wanted to position my life toward God. For years I had been pursuing and seeking and trying to become the person God intended me to be. For years I had been working really hard to do anything but actually let grace change me. I was tired of going to church and talking about my heart and fasting and reading and praying and singing songs to God. All of those things can make you tired. Even reading that sentence can make you tired.
For months I wrestled with what was real.
Who is Jesus?
What are the true modern implications of the Bible?
How do I respond to a hyper-emotional spirituality that I don’t experience?
More than ever, forty days ago, I wanted to walk away. I wanted to take my life as my own and grab at all the flavors of the earth. I wanted death. (We always know when we want death. We can feel it, sense it, see it). But before I could walk away from God, if that’s even possible, something unusual sparked within me.
A desire to stay.
And if I were to stay I’d need to know the real Jesus. I’d need to figure out just who this man was that I wanted to follow. I’d need to remember what I had forgotten in the midst of a pride that hinted at knowing it all. And so, I decided to read the Bible for Lent. Forty days. I could read one word a day. I just needed to read. It felt much less impressive than my earlier days of pithy self-righteous sacrifices; maybe that’s why it felt much more honest than my earlier days.
It took me a while to find my Bible, to dust off the cover, to believe the truth on those too-thin pages. I can safely say that nothing magical happened. At least not right away. There were no remarkable encounters; there were only words that I had read before and stories I already knew the ending too. But something more beautiful, and perhaps more significant transpired. My heart changed. In the midst of being at the end of my rope my heart grew less offended toward the things of God. He reoriented all of it. He reoriented my heart back unto Himself. I didn’t really do anything. I just read some stories. I just trusted that things I couldn’t see would happen if I just relinquished.
When I walked into the Lent season I thought that more spiritual discipline might save me. The truth is, is that discipline doesn’t save us. Trying to be perfect doesn’t work either. Lent was about me admitting that I need God. I need Him to save me and help me and love me. I need Him everyday. And I need Him more than I thought. Scripture gave me new eyes to see the truth for myself. The truth that I’m loved even when I can’t see it and forgiven when I don’t deserve it. It also gave me better eyes to see that I’m too hard on myself everyday of the week and that my life has never been about my ability to do anything.
I’m finding that God wants humility more than all the things that we think make us look awesome. He wants teachable lovers and prophets and visionaries; p eople who fail and return ready to try again. People who don’t have big egos and who don’t claim to be perfect. He wants us to be honest and to say that sometimes the biggest step we can take is to read a few words from the Bible for forty days.
He wants us to stay.
