Advance To Abandonment

Lent compels us: advance to abandonment.  Whereas we often confuse abandonment with passive inactivity, the Lenten season insists that we take action, cutting erroneous ties and re-lashing our moorings to Christ.  With the Prodigal, "I will arise and go to my father..."  I will arise-- I will wake up, get, up, grow up, and climb up.  I trash and discard the garbage piling up in my heart and mind.  Ruthlessly, I inventory motive and attitude and address each in desperate fashion.  I recalibrate my attention to Christ each day with savage intentionality.  "Reckon yourselves dead to sin..."  This is no valley of ease; this is a summit to scale under harrowing and hellish conditions.  Lent places me precariously on a rocky crag with no safety net below, and bids me ever higher.  "I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God who loved me, and gave himself for me." (Galatians 2:20)

What's Up Doc?

(12:56 am) It's either much too early or much too late to be writing, but either way I'm much too awake to avoid the urge.  My teenage daughter was invited to see a late feature with friends which meant a 20 minute drive into town at 9:20 pm, the same back home, and all over again at midnight to retrieve her. Such are the parental moments that add purpose to the thinning & greying hair, and discoloration to the bags suspended and inflating below my eyes.  I've somehow reached a stage of geriatric limbo--I fall asleep in my chair while "watching" TV, then can't find my way back to lala land after a midnight paternal run to town.  This somehow reminds of Paul's words in the New Testament, something to the effect that I do the things I don't want to do and fail to do that which I should--call it a kind of senior disequilibrium.  Now, if only I can summon the 'umph' to translate insomnia into productivity.  Whoever said you're only as old as you feel wasn't old or he wouldn't have said it; he would either have been drinking coffee to stave off the dropsies or been hitting the fridge in search of a slumber-inducing combination.  What was it Bugs Bunny used to ask, "What's up Doc?" Perhaps understanding this is too much to ask and I should self-content with knowing that at least I won't have long to toss and turn before bracing for another round of life.