Lent 2024: Ten Steps

A friend recently told me about something a legendary golfer does when he hits a bad shot. He allows himself ten steps to think about the shot, then thinks of it no more. This ten-step approach to dealing with bad shots is so simple, and yet it’s enormously difficult to do - in golf and in life.

I can’t begin to tell you how often I’ve hit bad golf shots. Unlike the wise golfer who only stews over his bad shot for ten steps, I’ve thought about mine for days and ruined wonderful days on beautiful courses. To learn the ten-step rule would be a significant improvement in my game. It would improve the way I live my life.

When I look back, I can see countless mistakes I’ve made over my life. Some have cost me dearly. But what I mourn almost as much as the mistakes themselves is how long I’ve thought about them. I have used those mistakes to bludgeon myself over and over again. Had I learned the ten-step rule when I was young, maybe I’d have used those ten steps to think about my mistakes and then move on. Instead, I’ve carried those mistakes with me and missed much of the joy of other “shots.”

Some people decide they’d rather carry the mistakes of others than their own. They do so long past the ten-step limit. Stewing in the waters of resentment and rage, they miss the freedom of letting things go and getting on with this game called “life.”

It’s time to try something new.

In Lent, we’ve looked at our lives - our fears, wounds, and mistakes. It’s time to practice the ten-step rule and let our mistakes, and the mistakes of others, go.

There’s a happy, joyous, and free life waiting for us all. It only takes ten steps to get there.

Lent 2024: A much-needed sermon.

Sometimes the best sermons are found in the pews.

The family processed down the aisle in various shades of black and took their places in the front row. A family of five, the parents strategically sat where each child had a parent beside. The church was bright, but the sadness dark. The death was unexpected, so bewilderment swirled with the candle smoke along with sadness and anger.

Through it all, the parents held their children. One arm wrapped around her son’s shoulder, the other linked between her other son’s arm. The dad clung to his daughter, occasionally tilting his head to meet hers in the middle.

Stirring hymns were sung, wonderful reflections shared, and the minister said something, but I was too busy listening to the sermon in front of me. I thought about the time I sat in the front pew, when death’s cruelty overwhelmed me, but I also thought about all the other kinds of struggles we face just making our way through this thing called “life.” They leave us bewildered, sad, and maybe angry, but watching the parents sitting beside their children, I couldn’t help but imagine God sitting beside us. With an arm wrapped around our shoulder, with His head leaning in, somehow, I think God sits beside each of us. It doesn’t take away the pain, but it transforms it.

During this season of Lent, we’ve looked into dark places – places of sadness and pain – but it’s important to remember there’s someone sitting beside us. There’s an arm wrapped around us. It doesn’t take away the difficult soul-work we’ve been doing, but it transforms it.

One might say it doesn’t take away the tomb, it’ll just empties it.

Lent 2024: Week three.

Wounds

I can still feel the pain even though it’s been years since I sat in my childhood dentist’s chair. “It’s just air,” he said as he pushed the button and blew a burst of air in my face. It made me laugh. When he blew the air in my mouth and hit my newest cavity I was no longer laughing. I arched my back and gripped the arms of the seat so tight I thought they might break.

So it is when you touch a cavity or any kind of wound. They go unnoticed until they’re touched, or a gust of life’s wind blows in their direction. The pain makes us feel them again for the first time.

We all have wounds. Some might be small and shallow, others large and deep. Some might have healed; others could well be scabbed and ready to open at a moment. Maybe it’s a wound about money, a relationship, a health issue, or career event. Wounds come in all shapes and sizes, and they are specific and unique to us. (Example: a friend does not have the same wounds about money that his spouse does, so when they meet to do taxes, wounds get touched and she recoils.)

I suppose wounds are part of being human, and Lent is a time to acknowledge our wounds. Like our griefs (week 1), and our brokenness (week 2), ignoring our wounds does not get them to disappear. Only by looking, letting them be seen as the hurts they are, will they ever heal.

Such truth is easier to write than practice. No one wants to feel pain, let alone feel it again, but someone wiser than I once taught me that there’s new life on the other side of the pain. When clinging to the arms of a chair and arching my back, the hope of that new life is the only thing that sees me through. Yes, I admit, I’ve often reached for “Novocain” of every sort, but that only delayed the pain and sometimes created new wounds of their own.

This Lent, I want to do the work so that, come Easter, there are more empty tombs than the one two thousand years ago. That would be something to celebrate, indeed.