When Lent Gets to Your Head

This is what I know.

I know I have seen the sun rise over Appalachian hills where I was born, over the Arno river running to catch a train, over the Atlantic in the south singing on Easter morning, over a lake from the dock in the north, and over terracotta housetops as it shined into my rear view mirror that one day the Alps claimed shotgun.

I know how snow falls in a pine forest in winter, and it is so light falling but it's heavy when it lands and weighs down the branches. It landed on me and made me short of breath.

I know walking into a hospital room, and there's this little human in a plexiglass container and she's your sister that just came out of your mom's body.

I know Mom&Dad walking into the kitchen after an 18 hour flight and Mom's got this little Asian kid sister on her hip for us and she's just as magical with her spikey black hair and almond eyes and she can't sit up even though she's 15 months old because she's malnourished.

I know fireflies in the swamplands at night, and digging deep into the mud by day to find the earth that's streaked with blue because blue means clay and you can work it and turn it into things.

I know one time the sun rose and its audacity caught me off guard because it had been a long night and it didn't seem like it should rise ever again. I do know some pain. Who doesn't? I know some people know a lot more pain than I do, and it is absurd that I have been handed a life that is as good as it is, one that has included light, and water, and the birthing and rescuing of life, and art.

I also know Jesus Christ, and I know he was crucified to reconcile me to his Father, who I sinned against. Sure it doesn't seem fair that the sin of the one man Adam should have gotten stuck in his soul's DNA and imputed to me, but then again, it's not really fair that the death of just one man Jesus should rescue me, is it? All I need to do is choose the grace, admit my need for him.

More than not being fair, the fact that the answer to my sin—my breach of faith with God—is the death of God himself on a Roman cross some 2000 years ago, is absurd. I mean seriously, come on God!? You are going to save the world by being born of a Middle Eastern teenage virgin (who does that?), living sinlessly but still understanding what it is to be tempted with sin and suffer and work for a living, then dying from asphyxiation nailed to a piece of wood?! And then a few days later coming back to life, and appearing to women first...people don't like to listen to women. Why tell a woman first? Scandalous.

The whole thing is absurd. It's the answer, but it's absurd.

Our ultimate need is rescue from these bodies of death. The ultimate answer is salvation through Jesus on the cross. The absurd answer is the ultimate answer to the ultimate question and need.

All these other questions—the millions of "why" questions that I have and cry over and struggle over—are not ultimate questions. They are legitimate, but they are not ultimate. 

But because the answer to the ultimate question is absurd, I am going to hazard the guess that all the other answers—the ones I do not know, because the only thing I know is Jesus Christ and Him crucified—are equally absurd.

Equally absurd, equally beautiful.

I'm never going to find them, not here. Not by logic, not by some personal spiritual experience.

But the absurd? The absurd I can trust in solidly.

Because it is the absurd that saved me.