The season of Lent often focuses our attention on new beginnings. When Israel rushed out of Egypt into the desert they began a journey into being a new creation, from being a nation of slaves to being a nation of free men and women joined to God by the covenant. This journey took forty years
and it wasn’t easy. In the Gospel when the prodigal son finally realized he would be better off back home as a hired worker than stealing slop from the pigs, he began a journey from being lost to being found, from being dead to being alive. This journey did not take forty years, but how do you
measure in clock hours a journey that transforms the heart? This journey wasn’t easy either. The path to being a new creation can take forty years, forty minutes or forty seconds. Sometimes it involves an outer journey but it is always an inner one. Such a journey is difficult—dying to self always is. What matters is that we make it. Because the end result is the radiance of a people, or a son or daughter, who has finally arrived where they belong, at a party where the Father has an arm around them. Lent is a journey that is meant to make us change where we need to so that we can be fully with the Father in that way. Where is Lent taking us so far? Are we really on the journey? If not, it’s not too late to start, but it soon will be.
