Dear God: A Lenten Prayer

Dear God,

I find myself another year older and once again faced with the question of the season: what will I give up for Lent?  Even as I ask it though, it seems sorrowfully ironic.

Lent, after all, is a season of preparation for acknowledging Your journey to the cross and eventual resurrection.  As I look for options of what to "give up" this year, every suggestion seems extraordinarily pathetic.  Facebook?  Pinterest?  Texting?  Chocolate?  What do you "give up" to prepare for thanking the man who gave His life as a ransom for yours?  What gets you ready for that time?

I realize as I run through my list of options that I have taken the season of preparation I set aside and turned it into a time of behavior modification.  I take my material attachments and force myself to relinquish them for forty days, only to return to them a few weeks after Easter.  Or, even if my Lenten habits do become regular ones, I fail to address the sin that lies at the root of my problems and thus, it simply manifest itself in a different form.  Less Facebook, more Netflix.  Less chocolate, more McDonalds.  Less of one idol, more of the other.

How can I offer you Facebook when you offer me life?  Lord, I realize that simply using Lent as a motivator to diet or quit fast-growing addiction falls severely short of what you ask of me.  So this Lent, I pray not that I have the strength to change my behavior, but that I have the strength to allow you to change my heart.

Because knowing You was never about giving anything up; it was about the relationship... and the new life that it offered.

Amen.

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