“If you focus on what needs to be changed, your brain will start scanning for things that are wrong and see more and more of them and change will be hard. If you focus on a core value and tie the changes to that, when the value will function as its own center of gravity and change will be easy.” This was the opening to a class on diversity and multiculturalism a few weeks ago. It was also the week following the first Sunday of Lent, so, of course, my brain made connections. Change is hard. Change, if done right, should be easy. We enter Lent with the expectation of being changed (or, at least, renewed.) We focus on our flawed selves, our mortality, our sin, but also on God, eternity, forgiveness. What value grounds us in that walk through the wilderness and onward through Holy Week and into Easter?

I think that I struggle with Lent each year because the focus can to often be on what is wrong, the flaws, the sin, to the extent that the real focus can be obscured. How does one turn the focus from the myriad ways that we turn away from God and back onto God, totally and completely? It seems to me that Jesus, the One Who we follow into this desert, made it clear that our core value is to be love: love of God, love of neighbor, and love of each other. That seems so simple, yet we make it so difficult. Individually I know that I am guilty of anger, pettiness, self-centeredness, and fear, all of which blunt the capacity to love and obscure my vision of God and of others. Collectively the church as a whole cracks under the weight of centuries of putting its emphasis in the wrong places. Yet God loves us and fills us and uses us, alone and together, in spite of ourselves, and, in spite of ourselves, we are changed and we even become change.

O God, as I near the end of this walk through the Lenten wilderness, let me keep my eyes fixed on you. Water my barren soul, when change is hard. Let me rest in you, that change may be easy. Within my heart and in my world, may spring come by your hand and the desert bloom. Amen.

- Kathleen Knaack