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)