Lent's Turning Point

Reflections on the middle of, well, everything.

Good afternoon, friends! I hope you’re well on this last week of March. I have been very ill this past week. (I have a theory that I’ve accidentally been poisoning myself with spoiled oat milk, but that is not what this post is about so I’ll end that there.) But I am slowly on the mend, taking little walks outside to enjoy the fresh air and the spring trees (especially the sakuras!).

This Lent season I’ve been working through the Every Moment Holy 2023 Lenten Journal, which has been a very good gift to me. I’m working through the prompts slowly each day throughout the week – the questions are challenging and richly thought-provoking, and are inviting me to dig into Scripture in a fresh way.

Last Sunday was Laetere Sunday, a new term for me that I learned just this week. Laetere means “rejoice”, a gentle directive to rejoice right in the middle of the fasting season, to mark the forty days’ center and the nearing towards Easter. Those who participate in Lent are encouraged to feast, and observe the turning point.

I’m observing a few turning points in my life, lining up with this week. This Laetere Sunday week is a true middle for me. Not only is it the midway point between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday, but Spring Equinox was also this week, on Monday. This week of Lent also marks a significant turning point for me vocationally (more on that soon).

Even more significantly, this past week marks the exact midway point of the engagement season that Jake and I are in – four months engaged, with four months to go until our wedding day in early August. Engagement feels like a strange liminal space, an already-but-not-yet or a hurry-up-and-wait. Time feels like it’s rushing and standing still all at once. I make plans in fits and starts; I download a checklist, then download a different one a few days later. I am way ahead on planning in some ways and frantically playing catch-up in others. I’m clumsily learning to captain a meeting and delegate tasks with kindness and patience instead of anxious squirrel energy.

But beyond planning, engagement has also been an emotional in-between season, a turning point unique to its own. In some ways I feel I’m in between the life I’ve always lived and the new life I will step into, as Ellie Goings, a Mrs., and living a life of answered prayers that reach far into the past. We will be a family, the two of us, and make decisions together, serve God together, and go on new adventures, the ones we dream up and the ones that the Lord does. We’ll find new rhythms of life and worship and teamwork and fun and it will be a very, very good thing – but I also look on my life now: my independence, my many seasons of life in community with other women, even my complicated last name, and know that I will grieve the loss of some of these things I’ve come to treasure. As I consider the ending of some of these beloved aspects of my contemporary life, my mind tries to cook up ways that I can have my cake and eat it too. Jenny can move in with us someday, right, Jake? But calling a season good and also saying it’s finished is important, as I take this next turn in life gracefully and come out of it as a we. Like Laetere Sunday, we’ll mark the turning point with a celebration.

I try to keep my days. I always have. I am diligent and dutiful to rid my room and closet of clutter, but I have three boxes full-to-bursting under my bed – of notes from friends, programs of shows I loved, feathers foraged by the river of my college town, a menu from my favorite café in Glasgow. Birthday cards and love letters pile up over the years, and I keep them all to remember, to thumb through and recall a good, true, and beautiful past.

As I try to stay present, and as I work on looking to the future with readiness for the life to come, I consider all of these middles, these turning points. I’m reminded afresh of how time is in God’s hands, and how much he cares about it all: he’s lined these things up in his orderly, beautiful way. He is my true keeper of days – past, present, future.

My friend Elizabeth took this photo of me when last we were together at the Ordinary Saints Conference in February. I am not one to get absorbed in a photo of myself, but as I was browsing through the gallery she sent me last week I came upon this one with delight, seeing so many parallels to my present life within it. This image of me in between worlds, right on the centerline, is what life feels like. But I’m reading the image from right to left – I think I’m coming into focus.

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By the way, here’s the link for the Every Moment Holy 2023 Lenten Journal again. If you’re finding yourself stymied in your current Lent devotional practice, print it out and use it for the remainder of Lent! It’s free.