Lent is my favorite church season, followed closely by Advent, which is weird because I hate to wait. I am a really bad wait-er. The reason these are my two favorite seasons of the church calendar isn’t that Lent or Advent are particularly happy, because Lent certainly is not happy. I am also not a masochist, so I don’t love these two seasons because of my intense need for self-punishment at waiting. My love for Lent and Advent probably has more to do with the fact that I know how long I will be waiting, and I know the outcome of the wait. I know that at the end of the 40-ish days, there will be a big event that makes the wait worthwhile. At the end there is a birth, there is resurrection. There is hope.
Another of my favorite things is the day when I realize that the sun is rising again on my way to work, when I am not driving the entire hour-ish in the dark. Driving out of the darkness into a sunrise is the best way to start a day of work, or of travel, or even of play. Especially if that sunrise is filled with purple deepness and yellow brightness and red intensity. The sunrise brings with it a sense of a new beginning; there is hope; the beauty of the earth is a forever thing.
The most beautiful day right now in my life is the day when Ash Wednesday and the sunrise morning happen to coincide. In other words, today is my most beautiful day.
On my way to school this morning, I listened to a podcast called “Everything Happens” featuring Kate Bowler and Nadia Bolz-Weber. In the conversation, they talk about how things happen and about how we frame the bad things that happen: “I think that those kinds of ideas, you know, the reason it hurts is because it’s painful, not like, the reason this thing in your life is hard is because hard things in life are hard. It’s not a spiritual failing of yours that this feels bad. Hard things feel hard. Period” (Bolz-Weber). My take away is that we try to make difficult things seem like they are our fault, but we always think the beautiful things are someone else’s fault. Maybe just take away fault. Bad things are bad. Good things are good. Beautiful things are beautiful. Things are.
The sunrise morning, and the beginning of my favorite season of the church calendar, happening on the same day makes me joy filled and helps me to recognize how beautiful God is and how amazing [Their] work in this world is.
Reason Breeds Insanity 