Heidi Goehmann

It wasn’t until the last few years I began to appreciate Lent.

Lent helped me tremendously in processing the pandemic. After all, my world (maybe yours as well) shut down only a couple weeks after Ash Wednesday 2020. I didn’t mind the dumpster fire of 2020 too terribly much. I got cozy with a new Bible study and mostly handed out snacks to my children who never seemed to be full. But then another year rounded the bend and another year of that mess felt like full on drudgery. I could taste the disappointment of Covid’s sheer tenacity in my mouth. All that was taken from us does’t seem so close, but neither does it ever feel far enough away. Will it ever feel far enough away?

This is how most grief works, waiting for the languid smoke to clear even a bit, but our culture doesn’t have much room for grief. We don’t have much room for sorrow, for sadness, or for tears.

Lent, however is different. Lent makes space for all the yuck. Lent is for contemplation, for guilt, for the brokenness, for the hurt, for the heartbreak. It’s a whole season reserved for the deep disappointment that sin exists and that Jesus not only hears us, but that this God of ours became one of us to atone, to dissolve the distance, to shoulder the shame.

If Jesus can take on the cross, I’m pretty sure my tears don’t scare Him. If Jesus can die for the whole world, perhaps maybe He can hold my heart when it hurts. Perhaps, stricken, smitten, and afflicted, means He knows all to well the pain and has plenty of space for our challenging emotions, along with our pleasant ones.

This lent, I want to invite you to honor your own challenging emotions, make a little room for them, a little space for them to process. When God in Trinity wrote out the story of Their own affection for humanity in the Bible, God didn’t leave out the gunk. The lament is there, and the anger, the struggle, the hopelessness, and the fear.

Let’s rest a moment before God with our emotions. Let’s take a moment to honor what often gets pent up inside of us. Let’s lay back in the arms of our Savior and experience Christ’s kindness moving through us. God is not apart from these things. God’s Gospel is for these things as well.

The sorrow and sadness and tears don’t have to take over. There is always joy and restoration and love abundant in this God of ours. But you can have both. Life is full of both.

To help you practice honoring your sorrow, I made a list - 40 days, 40 passages in the Bible where God honors humanities sorrow and doesn’t turn His face. God invites our processing and in that processing there is deeper connection.

Easter is never far off. May your lent leave room for the sadness & the joy. God honors both.

Lent Scripture List Sorrow Tears Sadness — Download the Scripture list by clicking on the image.