A team event
Like many of us, I’ve found a great escape and joy in watching the Winter Olympics. From the subtle skill of the curlers to the fierce bravery of the downhill skiers, I cannot get enough of watching the athletes do their thing—not just as individuals, but as a team. Some of these are team events, but even the ones barreling down a steep hill on their own are not actually alone. They’ve got this team of people around them, supporting them, encouraging them.
The same is true for our faith. This next week, we’ll begin the season of Lent. These 40 days before Easter provide intentional time to re-commit ourselves to God and to the life God has in mind for us. These days invite us to face the realities of our own faults and failings—the ways we don’t quite live up to our own expectations, much less God’s expectations of us.
So often we think of the work of this season to be only an individual process—me and God working out the kinks. It is necessary to tend, in solitude and quiet, to our relationship with God. But perhaps some of the same outcomes might come from deliberate togetherness, not only intentional solitude. What if we chose to make Lent a sort of team event?
It might mean that we share a deeper part of ourselves with the people we are close to. Maybe we re-commit to regular worship. Maybe it’s taking time to pray with our family or share with our close friends about the stuff in our hearts we are usually too timid to be open about? We could invite them, like a good coach, to hold us to some accountability with our intentions.
Or—we could spend Lent putting ourselves into situations where we will connect with others. Through relationships with familiar and unexpected people, we may just find ourselves discovering all sorts of things about ourselves and our relationship with God. Things we’d never discover on our own.
As you think about the ways you will keep Lent this year, even as we do our own individual events, make some plans to connect with intention to others. It doesn’t always feel natural to introduce ourselves to others over church coffee, or to show up at a visitation for someone we barely knew, or to slow down our gait to walk and talk with someone. But it is in these moments that we might just find ourselves part of a team, held in community, and drawn more closely to God.
The traditional practices of Lent—prayer and worship, fasting, and acts of service and love are not Olympic events. They won’t get you a gold medal or a Nike contract. But, on your own and in community, they will bring you a renewed sense of purpose, a clarity of who we are supposed to be, and a recollection of our belovedness.
