I expected things to change, for life to be different, but there was nothing. There were the same number of things on my “to-do list” and e-mails to respond to, laundry to complete and weeds to pull. Nothing seemed to change last Wednesday like I thought it should.

Last Wednesday began our season of Lent. Lent is the forty days prior to Easter. These forty days are symbolic of Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness and the forty years of the Israelites in the desert where they were tested, challenged and learned how to depend upon God. The season has often been described to me as forty days of giving up and taking on. People give up chocolate, TV, Facebook and take on prayer, time with God and a better Christian lifestyle. For forty days we are to pray, confess and contemplate our walk with Jesus.

We begin these forty days on Ash Wednesday. At Pinnacle we join on Wednesday evening for worship, communion and the imposition of ashes. We place the ashes on our foreheads as a sign and symbol of the dust we came from described in Genesis and the dust that we will return to in death. The life and death that comes from God and lives with us during our busy, stressful and sometimes hectic lives.

But after the service was over and I had been anointed with the cross of ashes on my forehead nothing seemed different. You would think I would feel the holy presence of Jesus, ready to hunker down and spend these forty days together. But I could only think about the mountain of emails, a long list of to do items and the spirit I expected to change in me as we began Lent, wasn’t really there.

I expected to feel like I had entered a holy season, a time when moments for prayer would be more evident. The feeling of God’s presence was swirling around me, and the anticipation of Easter would be as exciting as Christmas morning, but I got up Thursday morning feeling exactly the same way.

That is when I realized that the emails, to-do lists and my attitude of life around me was never going to change unless I changed. Jesus asks us to change not by stopping what we are doing, but by seeing our days differently. Lent isn’t the season when God writes the 11^th commandment, thou shall find time for me today…Lent is the season of recognizing that we don’t always know where Jesus is in our day. We are asked to allow ourselves to be lost, so that instead of finding God where we want to see him (and in turn, ignoring God in other places of our lives) we let the Holy Spirit find us.

I realized that I was expecting Jesus to show up with a Where’s Jesus picture page (like Where’s Waldo, but better) so that I could spend these forty days searching for Jesus. Jesus would know what I needed to work on, but that would mean that our relationship was all about me. I needed to find Jesus, I needed to work harder, I needed to plan my prayer time more efficiently. It is just the opposite, which is why Lent is so difficult. Jesus doesn’t want us to find him, instead He wants us to stop and let Jesus find us. Lent is about letting our busy, full and sometimes stressful lives be set aside so that Jesus can enter those place too.

Our journey with Jesus doesn’t change in an instant; remember, it took forty years for the Israelites in the wilderness to figure it out. Use these forty days to allow Jesus to enter every corner of our life and be present.

As I write this, it is the morning of Ash Wednesday, 2014. The Ash Wednesday service is my favorite service in the Christian year. (Yes, more than Easter!)

I think it all dates back to Ash Wednesday, 1994. I was on a Sabbatical leave and living in Capetown, South Africa. I was preacher in residence at St. George’s Cathedral in Capetown. St. George’s is the mother church of South African Anglicanism. I preached at St. George’s for three months and taught preaching to a group of Anglican priests.

At noon time on Ash Wednesday Barbara and I attended the Ash Wednesday service at St. George’s. The officiant at the service was Archbishop Desmond Tutu. It came time for the congregants to come forward and receive the imposition of ashes. Barbara and I came forward, knelt, and Desmond placed the ashes with the outline of the cross on our foreheads, repeating those ancient words: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

Tonight Barbara and I will attend the Ash Wednesday service at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in our little village of Litchfield Park. It is always good to sit with her. For most of our marriage I have been sitting “up front” as a leader in worship, and she in the congregation.We will sit together and with all the other worshipers reflect on our lives–the things done, the things left undone. 

And the climax of the service will be when my friend, the priest of St. Peter’s, the Rev. Gae Chalker, will impose ashes on us. “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.”

Not a bad thing to reflect upon our mortality. Samuel Johnson once quipped, “The thought that a man is to be executed at sunrise concentrates the attention wonderfully.”

I know I will be thinking about my life tonight in that service. I will review where I am, where I have been, and where I am going. I will ask God’s forgiveness for the many places where I have fallen short. And with God’s grace, and with the reminder of those ashes on my forehead, I hope to do a little better in the days ahead. 

In my third grade Sunday School class, back around 1966 or 7, we colored a big wheel of a paper calendar drawn as a sundial with the different colors of the church year—green, white, red, purple.  (Blue wasn't being used for the weeks before Christmas yet.)  We learned when Advent falls (four weeks before Christmas), that Christmas is actually two weeks long (12 days from Christmas to Epiphany), that Lent is 40 days (excluding Sundays), about Ordinary time and where to look on the calendar to find various liturgical "feasts" like Pentecost, Easter, All Saints Day (Reformation Sunday for the more Protestant among us), or Super Bowl Sunday (okay, not Super Bowl Sunday).  I'm sure that it was a noble, if silly, attempt to enculturate us into the church--to understand its rhythms, appreciate changes through the year, and know that what happens in church shapes how we make life.  I was proud that I knew what Whitsuntide was (though the season of Whitsuntide was abandoned by the wider church a few years later).  It felt like secret knowledge in a world getting more and more secular.  But how much it inculcated a living faith, I'm not really sure.  I don't want to rule it out, but at the same time I certainly don't want to confuse my crayola covered liturgical sundial with profound Christian education. 

And today it's even harder.  For as much as it was already beginning then, it was not long before lingering cultural vestiges of religious rhythm were either let go or absorbed into a stronger commercial rhythm.  Advent is a shopping season, still referencing Christmas but exhibiting little of what Advent has been in Christian history.  Blue laws are gone, and even a temporarily negotiated settlement to leave Sunday mornings free for Christians to worship has pretty much disappeared.  I doubt many school cafeterias accommodate students of Roman Catholic or other ecclesial communities who might fast from meat other than fish on Lenten Fridays.  Stephen Colbert will have ashes on his forehead for his show tonight, observant Catholic that he is on Ash Wednesday, but for many his ashes will be taken to be dry humor rather than the unremarkable expression of identity it probably is for the comedian himself.  I remember seeing a calendar on MTV some years ago, with graphics marking various days.  On Ash Wednesday one saw an animation coming off the calendar of a haggard old person with a cigarette, coughing and letting the ashes drop from the end onto her clothes:  "Ash Wednesday" it said.  It was treated like a fleeting cultural memory to be used for effect, not the marker of a rhythm of life to respect. 

And so it's Ash Wednesday as I write this.  It's the beginning of what many Christians call Lent, which is (quoting my third grade discovery) the 40 days, minus Sundays, before Easter.  It's meant to be a time of quiet, of self-reflection and confession of failing, of renunciation and sacrifice in hopes of receiving greater clarity on life and truer abundance, of family and church and learning.  It's meant to be a long breathing in to anticipate the great breathing out of Eastertime. 

Leaves me wondering how to enculturate a third grader into all of that today?  Crayons and construction paper weren't great in 1966, but they would seem actually counterproductive in 2013.  Maybe it takes living sundials today—folks who know what time it is in living life and who can teach Lent not by wearing purple on Sundays but by demonstrating in hard and worthy ways how self-reflection, apology and reconciliation, sacrifice for a greater good, fasting from over stimulation (of food, of technology, of activity, of accumulation, of distraction) can help us receive new focus and new clarity.  Maybe we need to talk about it all more, tell our stories more, share our struggles more, and admit together that it's not easy to live the rhythms of a Christian life in the world we're creating. 

Maybe our third graders simply need to hear us admit it, and to say to them even as we say to each other that we wish we could live otherwise than how we do. 

That'll be a start.  A good way to enter Lent.