Every year, as winter begins to loosen its grip and the first hints of spring whisper at the edges of our days, the Church enters a season that calls us to slow down and pay attention. Unlike major holidays such as Christmas and Easter, Lent arrives quietly—not demanding attention so much as inviting it. It is the ancient, steady rhythm by which Christians prepare to walk again with Jesus toward the cross and the empty tomb.

Lent’s history reaches back to the earliest generations of believers. By the second century, Christians were already observing times of fasting and prayer leading up to Easter. Over the centuries the pattern deepened into what we now recognize: a forty‑day season patterned after Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness. Yet the meaning has remained surprisingly consistent. Lent has always been less about what we give up and more about what God gives: space, honesty, repentance, and the renewing mercy of Christ.

The forty days are not arbitrary. Throughout Scripture, the number forty signals a time of testing, reshaping, or waiting—Israel in the wilderness, Noah on the ark, Elijah on the journey to Horeb. These were not seasons of spiritual celebration. They were seasons of dependence. Lent teaches us the same posture. It is not an endurance test for the spiritually strong but a place where the weary, distracted, and burdened can breathe deeply of God’s grace again.

Our practices during Lent—whether fasting, extra prayer, added Scripture reading, or acts of generosity—are not spiritual achievements. They are simple ways to clear a little room, to let the Word of God echo again in the places where noise and hurry have crept in. Lent is not where we prove our devotion; it is where Christ meets us in our need.

The season begins with Ash Wednesday, a day that speaks with unusual clarity. As the sign of the cross is traced in ashes on our foreheads, we hear the ancient words: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Lent starts not with what we might accomplish, but with what we cannot escape: our mortality, our sin, our limits. Yet even in that moment, the shape on our brow is a cross. Death does not have the final word. Christ enters our dust to raise us from it.

Ash Wednesday sets the tone for the entire season. We come as people who know the truth about ourselves—our impatience, our anxious striving, our habits of self‑justification. But we also come as people who know the truth about Christ—that He has borne our sin, carried our griefs, and gone ahead of us into death so that we might rise with Him. Lent does not shame us; it frees us. When the Law tells the truth about our need, the Gospel rushes in with the larger truth of God’s love.

Over the weeks that follow, the Scripture readings appointed for Lent slowly draw us closer to Jesus’ journey. We walk with Nicodemus under the cover of night, with the Samaritan woman at the well, with the man born blind who learns to see more than sight alone. Their stories become our stories—places where Christ reveals Himself not to the polished and confident but to the unsure, the thirsty, the confused, the broken. Lent reminds us that these are precisely the ones He comes to save.

In congregations across the world—and here in our own life together—we gather for midweek services, often around simple meals. There is something profoundly comforting about this pattern: the warmth of fellowship, the steady Word of God, the cross becoming clearer as the season deepens. These Wednesdays are small oases in the week, quiet reminders that God does not hurry His work in us. He leads us gently.

The color of the season is purple—a sign of royalty and repentance. The alleluias are set aside for a time, not because joy has disappeared, but because the Church is watching and waiting. Lent teaches us a slower joy, the kind that grows in silence and trust, the kind that bursts into fullness only at Easter dawn.

As we make this annual journey, we do so knowing that we walk in the footsteps of countless Christians before us. They too turned their faces toward the cross. They too learned to rest in the mercy of Christ. And they too were met—again and again—by the grace of a Savior who does not tire of loving His people.

And as Lent always does, this season will carry us toward the most profound week of the Christian year. But that story deserves a space of its own.

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Next month, we’ll take a closer look at Holy Week—Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, and Good Friday—as we prepare to stand again at the foot of the cross and behold the depth of Christ’s love.