Lent — A Reality Check
Every year at this season, the Church has traditionally focused the sights of believers on the stark reality of sinful human condition, on the theory that it is pointless to proclaim a gospel of salvation if folks have no real understanding of why they need saving. Lent is a time for moral inventory. Just as everyone who is in the sales business takes an annual inventory of his stock of merchandise so that he can determine what items on his shelves have been marketable, and therefore profitable, and what goods have not moved, so must every sensible individual assess at regular intervals what in his life has proven of worth in terms of durable satisfaction and genuine growth or spiritual prosperity on the one hand, and what has been merely meretricious, a drag, or a liability, on the other, so that he can stock up on the former and cull out the latter. If he doesn't, spiritual and psychological bankruptcy will be staring him in the face, sooner or later.

On Ash Wednesday we were reminded that "we are dust, and to dust shall we return,"as a first step in our annual reality check. Those aspects of our lives that pertain solely to the indulgence of our physical appetites and narcissistic cravings -- the mere prolongation of our bodily existence and self-adulation -- must be weighed in the scales of our values against those habits and practices that satisfy our spiritual hungers and enlarge our capacity to love others.

Lent is an opportunity for assessing profit and loss, for reordering priorities. "For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul?" asked Jesus. The God who made us and loves us enough to sacrifice His own Son so that you and I may have a more abundant life cannot lift us up if we are so preoccupied with feeding our bodies that we ignore the hunger pangs of our starving spirits. Why repeat the experience of the fellow who got blindly drunk one night and in trying to find his way home from the tavern bumped into a big tree in the darkness, and after groping his way around the entire circumference of the tree trunk, concluded that "It's hopeless - I'm hemmed in!"

~Robert M. Watson