My first Lenten experience occurred my junior year in college, seven years ago. It was a sort of drive by lent, if you will, where I learned about things as or after they happened. Suddenly it was Ash Wednesday and I learned that our church ate pancakes Tuesday night and then it was Wednesday at dinner and somehow I’d missed the memo that people usually fasted on Ash Wednesday and then I’d help myself to dessert somewhere I find out that I was supposed to give that up too. I had a lot to learn, and it drove me to distraction because I just wanted to do it right and no one was giving me the rules until after I’d broken them. Despite my perceived failure, when we emerged triumphant into Easter sunlight I could honestly say that I had encountered God in shadow of Lent. I had also picked up fragments of information, traditions, and other people’s practices that my subconscious began constructing into an elaborate system of rules for the next year.

The church seasons came and went and suddenly Lent was on our doorstep again. This time I was able to plan ahead and list out all of the things I was “supposed” to do, give up meat and sweets and chocolate and coffee and maybe take up a form of exercise and fast on Fridays. There were other things too; things to take on, prayer and stuff, but the former things stood out to me the most, those were the things to do that made it a really legitimate lent. In the middle of my planning, I had several friends point out to me that maybe, just maybe, I was being stupid and stubborn and missing the point. After years spent living with an unresolved eating disorder maybe all I was doing was planning a big Lenten starvation diet. Of course I kicked and screamed and told them that wasn’t so and that really, this was just how everyone did lent, and maybe God was calling me to do this, and how could did they presume to know what he was telling me.

Ash Wednesday dawned on an entirely different lent than the one I had so carefully fabricated in my imagination. Somehow God had gotten through my thick-headedness to show me that lent was a time to let go of those things that pulled me away from him, the little gods that I set up in the corners of my life and am tempted to worship. Lent was shockingly individual and not about a prescribed formula at all, no really book that would tell me how to do it right. Should I have expected anything else from our relational God?

Lent that year seemed a laughable antithesis of what everyone around me was doing. While people fasted, I went to the café. While some took up the discipline of exercise, I gave up 2 of my running days, opting to spend time walking on one day with a friend. It was humbling and awkward when people asked and I told them I was giving up running for lent, especially when it was followed by a suppressed smile and a question as to whether I was giving up eating vegetables too.

Forty days seems sometimes like forever and other times not long enough. Suddenly I could run again! Whenever I wanted! But something wasn’t the same. In the obedience of listening to what God had specifically told me to do, there was freedom but also a sense of caution as I began to recognize better the pull of various other gods in my life. That lent began a new conversation between me and God that would inevitably come up every year, usually beginning with me asking, “So God, um… about my running this lent…”