Being More Of Who We Ought To Be
By Rev. Alex Dreese
Rev. Alex Dreese Baptizing Henry Ellis on March 9, 2014.
As the Lenten season begins again for us, we are each invited to take a very important journey. In one sense it is a journey to Easter that the Christian church has been taking for centuries. In another sense there is a very personal dimension to it. The traditional disciplines of Lent…disciplines such as fasting, prayer, benevolent giving…are all intended to help us look, first of all, “inside” at the values we are holding…and secondly “outside” at the lives we are living. We are invited in these Lenten days to reopen our hearts to the presence of God, to realign our values with those things that are most valued and precious to God, and to reposition our lives so that God is able to use us to bless our world.
For all of us that means moving from where we are at this moment, closer to where God wants us to be. There is a little Lenten prayer that always comes to my mind in this season. It says:
God help me to be less of who I used to be..and more of who I ought to be.
It is a prayer of honesty for where our lives are now and a prayer of faith and hope, that with God’s help we can change, we can grow, and we can be at a better place.
I’m not sure exactly where that growing edge is for you just now, but I bet that you know.
It might be taking an honest look at your personal relationship with Christ..and the extent to which that relationship gives direction to your days and brings peace to your nights. And it may mean making a devotional, prayerful plan for spending more time together with Christ and deepening that relationship.
It might be taking a close look at your enthusiasms, priorities and commitments, ..to make sure that you are valuing the things that Christ has shown us to be most important and worth dedicating our lives to.
It might mean taking a fresh look at your relationships with others..and most importantly at those relationships that are not all that they should be. Christ has called on us to love the unlovable, to forgive without counting how often we do that, to be peacemakers in places of misunderstanding and conflict. Are there places this Lenten season where we need to shorten the distance that exists between ourselves and others?
Or maybe your growing edge is to take the faith and goodness that is already in you and help it find expression. There are all kinds of needs around us where God’s love can make an enormous difference, if we will bring it there. First Congregational Church has always been especially good at encouraging us in these directions. Right now in ways large and small, in places near and far, we can share our time and our gifts in important ways. We can discover the part of God’s business that is our business too.
There is plenty of challenge in what Lent asks each of us to do. Taking an honest look at who we are and where we are, and discovering that there is some growing to do, is never an easy thing…so it is important to end with a reminder about God’s grace. As we take our Lenten journey remember that we are surrounded by a God of patience and grace. God believes that in each of us there is great value, great goodness, and great potential. It doesn’t matter where we are today. It does matter that we use the days of Lent to grow in our faith and in our love. May God bless each of your journeys… and may Easter find us all “less of who we used to be and more of who we ought to be”.
