How Slow I Walk

How slow I walk...
My cross,
  heavy with sins
I would rather ignore,
  heavy with sins
I would rather forget,
  heavy with sins
I reject and regret.

How slow I learn...
My cross,
  heavy with sins
Is my way to the Lord,
  heavy with sins
I must learn to accept,
  heavy with sins
He already forgave.

How slow I see...
My cross,
  heavy with sins
He gave me as His gift,
  heavy with sins,
All His glory I lift,
  heavy with sins,
To my Lord who is light.

How slow, with Him,
My cross
  becomes love....

-by Barbara Benjamin

For forty days and forty nights every year, we are invited to take a break from the distractions of the marketplace and from our pursuit of personal gratification.  We are invited to take a Lenten journey, to experience what it is like to put God’s purpose at the center of our lives. 

Seeing that mankind was unwilling to put his purpose at the center of their lives, the Old Testament God became so discouraged with “the wickedness of man….that [he] was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved his heart,” and he determined to cleanse the world of the “wickedness of man” (Genesis 6:5-6):  “On that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened. And rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights” (Genesis 7:11-12).

Nearly a thousand years later, faced with a people who were still disobedient and “stiff-necked,” even after they were released from their bondage in Egypt (Exodus 24:18), God called upon Moses to bring the Ten Commandments to the Israelites: “Moses was there with the Lord forty days and forty nights without eating bread or drinking water. And he wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant—the Ten Commandments” (Exodus 34:27-28).

Some fifteen hundred years later, Jesus of Nazareth prepares to fulfill his Father’s purpose with forty days and forty nights of purification in the desert:  “Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit…was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and at the end of them he was hungry” (Luke 4:1-2).

Whether God is cleansing the world of man’s wickedness or preparing Moses and Jesus for their ministry, or whether we are preparing ourselves to move away from our daily distractions to focus on God’s purpose in our lives, this transition takes time.  It takes forty days and forty nights.  And it takes a willingness to embrace whatever discomfort we may feel in shifting our attention to Jesus as he prepares to fulfill his commitment to his Father:  as he prepares the Apostles for his Crucifixion and Resurrection at the Last Supper;  sweats blood in the Garden of Gethsemane; suffers Judas Iscariot’s betrayal; and is tried and Crucified.

If we view our discomfort during the forty days and forty nights of our Lenten journey as Jesus viewed his suffering, as part of our commitment to fulfill God's purpose in our lives, then we can endure our discomfort -- and whatever other suffering we face in life.  And enduring our discomfort and suffering in this way, we will find that not only do we experience the joy of a deeper understanding of Jesus' life within us, but we also find that our lives have greater significance because we have made a commitment to focus on God.