A Visual Reflection for the Start of Lent
Christ as dust – with us
Hello, friends. How are you? I feel that Lent has snuck up on me this week, right on the heels of an incredible weekend conference in Lancaster. I’m not ready, but I’m showing up for it anyway – I hope that you might, too!
My church communications team is graciously allowing me to do a second art series for Lent this year (I did my first in 2021!). I’ll share here the art pieces I’m creating, with some thoughts behind each work. I hope you enjoy this series – and I hope these images and thoughts are good companions for you in your own Lenten journey this year.
On Tuesday Jake and I hurriedly drove home from work in the afternoon, upon remembering a forgotten counseling appointment in the midst of poorly scheduled day. We slowed down on the road out of Springfield, caught in traffic due to a brushfire. We watched firefighters run a hose down the other side of the street, spraying down wooden fences caught on fire, mounted Dish satellites half-melted in the heat. Ashes floated over the median, settling on the windshield.
We drove into that thick cloud of smoke, but exited it in five minutes’ time. No one was hurt, and the edge of the neighborhood looked only a little charred and black as we drove past it on our way in to work the next day. The smoke makes me think of Syria and Turkey, with fires everywhere and untold amounts of people hurt or killed, enveloped in a smoky cloud of unknowing. I think of Jesus, born into a dry and dusty land, walking into the wilderness after being baptized.
Lent, the forty-day season of fasting before Easter, is meant to mirror this very moment of Christ entering the wilderness to be tempted by Satan. In years past I’ve fasted, meditating on Christ’s resistance of the temptations to receive comfort, protection, and power. This year, I’m thinking of how Jesus’ forty days of temptation parallels Israel’s forty wilderness years.
The Israelites would have faced the three categories of temptation Jesus faced, but another temptation I see in their account is plain despair, belief that their God who led them out of Egypt has forgotten all about them.
And Jesus arrives unconventionally, grows up in the boundaries of a quiet, average life, and is baptized by John and commissioned by God. “This is my son, who I love, with whom I am well pleased.”1 Then he enters the wilderness, intentionally, for forty days. His first act of missional life echos Israel’s season of suffering. Christ signals that he remembers them, and that he will walk in the wilderness they walked – physically, but also within the soul.
As I painted, these verses came to mind:
“For he knows our frame; he remembers we are dust.”2
and “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are — yet he did not sin.”3
This year, the incarnation is capturing my heart – that Christ chose to come and walk with us, and faced the obstacles and trials that we face. He saved us, but he also teaches us how to live. I’m grateful for that walk into the wilderness.
This year for Lent, I’m walking. I intend to take a short walk every day and spend it in prayer by talking to God and interceding for others. I think I need it.
How about you? Are you fasting from something, or taking up a new practice? Leave a comment – I would really love to know.
Matthew 3:17.
Psalm 103:14.
Hebrews 4:15.