Lenten Ponderings—Lent or Lint?
Years ago, taking care of the home front lent me the idea to use lint for Lent. To put it a bit more clearly without the bad dad joke language, I did a children’s message in worship during Lent using lint as an illustration. Lint– the stuff you’ve got to pull out of your dryer all the time– is composed of little bits of brokenness and detritus (now that’s a fun word I never get to use!), collected and pulled off of our clothes as a part of getting them clean.
Detritus– waste or debris of any kind according to Oxford, also “loose material that results directly from disintegration,” according to Merriam-Webster. You ever feel like your life has more than its share of brokenness? Or is your story perhaps one of trying to keep up with life, trying in vain to remain “integrated,” with parts of you just can’t keep up, and you have more of a sense of “dis-integration,” rather than being the whole person God has called you to be? Yup, that’s me.
Perhaps we need a “Lent trap” as we journey to Easter, as much as our dryers need a lint trap for our clothes. As the old song goes, “Fix me, Jesus!”– fix me for what you’re calling me to be, or at least in this season of Lent, help me get rid of the spiritual lint, the sinful brokenness and detritus that gets in the way of my relationship with God.
And how regularly do we clean out our dryer’s lint trap?
Maybe that’s a clue to how regularly we should do some intentional cleaning out of the spiritual lint in our lives—and the season of Lent is a great time to do that! But don’t stop there—just like cleaning the lint trap is not just an occasional or seasonal thing, keep on keeping on, not just in Lent, but throughout the year, intentionally clearing out the brokenness and detritus, so we can perhaps get a little bit closer to being integrated souls being a light for those around us.
Rev. Jim