Disruption

Life is full of disruptions.  I've spent the last couple of hours checking on whether or not the United States government is going to shut down tomorrow.  Apparently, in a last minute compromise of sorts, that has been averted--at least for now.  I suppose we'll play this game again in a week.  Life is full of disruptions.

We are definitely creatures of habit, beings dependent upon the rhythms in our lives--the rhythmic workings of our own physical bodies, the rhythms of day and night, of seasons, of time, and the rhythms that we've created in our own lives.  These rhythms are important to us.  They bring us a sense of order.  Life is just easier when it meets our own expectations of what will happen.  But life is full of disruptions.  Perhaps that is one of our lessons for this season of Lent.  In its own way, Lent is about disruptions.  It is about a change in rhythm.  It provides an opportunity to break from the familiar, to release oneself from the staid and sometimes almost robotic way of existing through which we walk without much thought or caring.  Lent invites us to think and care by offering us a sort of holy disruption.  It is a way of changing our rhythm, of relocating our center as we recalibrate our priorities and our lives.  It prepares us to see things differently.  It prepares us for what is to come.

For my Lenten discipline this season, I have been writing on this blog.  It is not always easy.  In fact, sometimes it is downright disruptive (as I'm sure you can tell on those days when I don't get it in very early!).  And yet, this holy disruption has changed the rhythm in my life.  It has made me think more deeply and more often about things.  It has opened my eyes to ways that I can encounter God that before I would have sped past and completely missed.  It has, indeed, relocated my center.  And as I approach Jerusalem, I am ready for that disruption too.  But the whole point of Lent as a holy disruption implies that it is, or should be, a point of permanent change.  Unlike the bill that is at this moment waiting to pass the House, Lent is not really meant to be a mere stop-gap.  We're not really supposed to just go back to "life as usual" when the Easter lilies come out.  (Now, you see, that is all the more reason why you shouldn't give up chocolate for Lent!)  It really is about change and preparing us as we trudge toward the biggest disruption that Creation has ever known.  Because there at the Cross, life as we know it was disrupted by death and then death as we know it was disrupted by Life.  And neither death nor life will ever be the same again.

So, as the drums of Crucifixion begin to get louder,  let your disruption become your Life!

Grace and Peace,

Shelli