“You hold my eyelids open;
I am so troubled that I cannot speak.
I consider the days of old,
the years long ago.”
—Psalm 77:4-5
In fall of 2015 I embarked on an eight month journey through the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, which begins with an examination of sin. As I progressed through the weeks it felt as if God were propping my eyes open, encouraging me to peer into my past and all the ways I had wronged him by what I had done and left undone. I had been warned that this would be a challenging point in the Exercises, yet there was no way to prepare for the barrage of emotions that came. Sometimes there was a flood of tears as I considered episodes in my life that I had never tried to view from God’s perspective before. Other times my eyes were dry, devoid of feeling. Just as Keith Green sang in the 1970s, my heart was hard and my prayers were cold.
For the first time I understood Jeremiah’s description of Judah, whose people had eyes but did not see, and ears but did not hear (Jer 5:21). I had been living in ignorance, and perfectly content to do so (vs. 31).
But no more. Jesus often told the crowds following him, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” I wanted to be a hearer, an obedient servant. Jesus taught many lessons, of course, but none so important as the one recapped by Paul:
“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are
justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in
Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood,
to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness,
because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins.”
—Romans 3:23-25
God passed over former sins. My sins. Like two sides of a coin, God calls me to be honest about my sins—past and present—while at the same time extending his completely unmerited favor (grace). This is the gift of God; this is the gift of Lent. And what a gift it is…today and always!