This is Compass finding spirituality in the everyday. I'm
Ryan Dunn. Here's a fun fact. Episodes about the
Christian season of Lent are consistently among
our most listened to episodes.
I I don't get it either. I guess people are just hungering for
something spiritual in this season, you know, while they
hunger for other things because they're they're fasting, you see.
Anyways, since you you and your friends seem to hunger for more Lent,
this episode delivers some of
that. Unfortunately, some personal circumstances
have kept me from doing a ton of research myself. My family is
mourning the loss of my father after a prolonged
illness while I prepare this episode. So I'm gonna
lean on to the words of my friend, Reverend Joseph Yoo, for
this particular episode. Joseph has been a guest on Compass
previously, and he wrote dozens of articles for our old Rethink
Church website. One article addressed a few questions
about Lent. Specifically, why give up things for Lent? Or,
you know, why do we fast for Lent? And what makes a
a good Lenten practice? So we're diving into that. It's
an audio essay for Lent by Joseph Yoo here
on this episode of the Compass Podcast.
I'm giving up being nice to my siblings for Lent, a youth student declared
emphatically. Well, if she can give up being nice, I'm
going to give up doing homework, another chimed in. Oh,
I'm gonna tell my parents that I'm giving up chores for Lent because the church
said it's a good thing to do. And that's when I
knew that I had incredibly messed up. For years,
we talked about giving things up for the Lenten season, but I
realized I never really talked about the why of the
seasonal fasting. At best, it was treated like a short
diet plan. No chocolate, or no soda, or no
coffee. And at worst, and this moment with my youth kids was
as bad as it could get, fasting became a scapegoat to
not do things you should be doing. One of the reasons why
we give things up for Lent is to sit with our hunger.
For the majority of us reading this, we often don't allow
ourselves to sit with our hunger. We don't need to.
In fact, we complain when our hunger isn't satiated in a timely manner.
Everything is seemingly readily and quickly accessible,
and the hunger I talk about goes beyond just food.
We get annoyed when there is a slight lag in the videos we're watching on
our phone. Amazon's Prime two day delivery sometimes doesn't
seem quick enough. We get a little agitated when we
mobile order our Starbucks while five minutes out and it's still not
ready when we arrive to pick it up. So the Lent season offers
us an opportunity to sit with our hungers.
We give something up to learn what the hunger reveals
about us. What is the hunger beneath the
hunger? And who or what or where is
God when I am hungry for something I desire?
Is it God the creator that will sate this hunger?
Or is it money, fame and popularity, relationships?
What is your hunger teaching you about yourself and your dependence on
God? And here are some Lenten practices I have engaged
in throughout my life that help reveal things about myself and
God. Silence. This Lent, I set aside
fifteen minutes of being in silence daily. It's
really easy for me to be silent, a side effect of
being an introvert. However, not having any
intentional noise around me has been a lot more difficult than
I anticipated. I often would spend the first fifteen minutes of a
walk without music in my ears and without talking. After a
few minutes, I felt the urge to talk to myself out loud
just to add some other noise around me. Why is it
so difficult to be in silence? So far, the
biggest thing this short period of intentional silence has taught me is to
be aware of God's presence. Sometimes I
focus on so much of my output that I may
miss the input from God. Being still and silent helps me
to edge closer to hear the still small voice of God.
Fasting. Sometimes I have fasted for meals, other
times certain medias. There are times where I have a stain from
particular foods, like coffee. This was the easiest to discern
what the fast was teaching me. Christians don't live on bread
alone. Fill in whatever your context is for bread.
During the season I gave up coffee and that caffeine headache
came roaring in, it really made me question if I was more
dependent on coffee or on prayer. Why
can't it be both? The physical hunger pangs made it
easier to be reminded that ultimately my dependence
is in God, that I'm made whole only in
and through God. Prayer. Most Lenten
seasons I like adding a discipline rather than taking something
away from my life or plate. Some seasons I add
intentional times of prayer. It's similar to taking time for silence,
but noise is involved. Instead of scrolling mindlessly
through social media or watching something on TV like I normally would do
in that time and space, I turned it towards prayer. This
intentional time of prayer reminded me that I don't need to be
entertained every waking moment of my life. It helped
me recenter myself and be reminded of what actually
are the priorities of my life. But most importantly,
it taught me that I am not God. God
is God. Intentional and Random Acts of Kindness.
Last year, I set out to bless someone, anyone, every
day. Michael Frost in Surprise the World described blessing
someone as adding strength to one's arm. This means leaving
someone slightly better than when we first encountered them, helping
them to breathe just a little bit better. So
I decided to be a small blessing in people's day. Take a friend out
to lunch, pay for a stranger's coffee, put my neighbor's trash bins back
after the trash was collected, send encouraging and affirming letters,
anything and everything. It was a practice of inviting Mother
Teresa's quote, do small things with great
love. I mean, what is one of the surest
ways to show my love for God? To love my
neighbor. The biggest takeaway from that season was I
can always afford to be generous.
So what are some of the revelations you are discovering in your Lenten
disciplines this year? It's
Ryan again. We'll be back to our normal schedule in two
weeks time. In the meantime, you can feast upon more episodes
of compass and get show notes and all that at
umc.org/compass. Thanks for taking this
break with me. I appreciate it. And I'm looking forward to getting back with you
soon. Peace.