After Easter

Several years ago, during the week before Easter, I overheard someone exclaim, “In eight days I can eat meat again!” Lent had ended and Easter had been celebrated, and I felt a nagging sense that I had missed the true value and meaning of “giving up” something for the forty days leading up to Easter. Was the practice more like a self-improvement project or a New Year’s resolution? Or was it supposed to stimulate a deeper, spiritual transformation and a growing closeness with God?

Lent fasting wasn’t something I had done historically, but that year, I had chosen to limit my scrolling through the news or social media before bedtime. But with Lent behind me, I wondered if the temporary suspension of my habit should be permanent. After all, it was like a branch not bearing fruit. What was the benefit if I only did it for forty days?

Lent had seemed like a good opportunity to evaluate this pre-bedtime area of time usage. But what was my true motivation behind this evaluation? Was I really trying to give something up in order to make room for closeness to God? Or was it really a self-improvement project masked as a spiritual exercise?

What I realized is that it was hard to know my true motivations. It was also challenging, in my own power, to cooperate with God’s loving attempts to expose parts of me that need work and to allow Him to change me.  

As I prayerfully wrestled through the forty days and fought against my habits and emotions and tiredness and human nature, my true motivation became clearer. My Lent observation wasn’t very spiritual or God-focused. It was definitely a self-improvement project. I wanted to be more productive. I wanted to get more sleep. And although wanting these things are good goals, they aren’t the purpose of Lent.

Over those pre-Easter weeks, as I continued to limit my screen time, using the time to pray, think, and journal, I started to realize that all the time-wasting I’d been doing was not only unproductive, it was formative…shaping me into something I didn’t want to be. I was using a significant chunk of time in the same way the world does and it was pushing me like Playdoh into the form of the world: stressed, sleep-deprived, and anxious. With this epiphany, my motivation shifted: I wanted to feel a greater sense of peace and connection to God before falling asleep. I wanted to go to sleep focused on prayer and gratitude rather than news and to-do lists.

I wanted to quiet the gnawing anxiety in my soul that I was wasting a gift. The feeling kept growing that I was exchanging God’s best for the world’s mediocre. In fact, I hadn’t been making a choice at all - I had been mindlessly following a pattern that I myself created.

1 Peter 4:3 told me that I had “spent enough time in the past doing what pagans choose to do.” Was I spending my bedtime any differently than the pagans? I came across Ephesians 5 just before Lent, where God reminded me that I used to be darkness, but now I’m light in Him. Am I living as a child of the light with regard to my time? Am I making wise use of my time? I have definitely figured out that things like mindlessly scrolling the news or Facebook frequently does NOT fill your mind with “whatsoever things are true…pure…just…”

This gets to the heart of why my time-wasting has been difficult to address: I haven’t been doing anything blatantly evil or sinful. I’ve simply been spending excess time on worthless pursuits when I’m bored or tired or lonely.

It’s easier to justify and continue habits and tendencies that aren’t sinful in and of themselves until they become idols that turn my heart and mind from Christ. It’s these subtle and insidious things that end up robbing me the most because I don’t even recognize that something valuable is being taken away.

I want to reach a different level of maturity in my faith and become more like Christ. I want to know God more and to do the good work that He has given me to do. But Christian growth and relationship with God takes focus and reflection and prayer. Maybe I could reclaim some time I was spending on other, very unproductive things.

When I was around 7 or 8 years old, I found a baby bottle in the back of a kitchen cabinet. I gleefully put water in it and started sucking on it. My family found this utterly ridiculous and made sure to let me know how silly I looked. 

How silly my habits must look to God, when I’ve been a Christian for so many years, yet still act like I don’t know how to grow closer to Him or how to obey Him! 

As difficult as it is for me to stop, examine, repent and obey, these acts are critical to the Christian maturity I crave. And I think these practices are humanly impossible without the power of the Holy Spirit, especially when the world draws us so powerfully to other things.

Just like, as physical beings, we are always growing and maturing, we are supposed to always be maturing and growing in our faith. I know this, so why don’t I give this transformation the utmost priority in my life? For me, it’s because my spirit is willing but my flesh is weak. It’s easier to do the familiar and the comfortable; to stay in the patterns I’ve already set. It doesn’t take any effort to simply accept the false sense of comfort and security my little habits give me, even when I wonder why I didn’t sleep well, or why I am always behind, or why my spiritual maturity level is unchanged from six months ago.

It’s like my eyes and mind are shielded from the truth of the good things God has for me, and I’m stupidly mucking around in the same muddy pig pen as the rest of the world.

Ultimately, I don’t want these changes in time usage for my own personal growth – for “self-improvement.” I want them because God tells me to want them. And I want them because I want to be a better witness of Christ to the world, starting with my own family. One valuable way to do that is to allow time for gratitude and prayer and to go to sleep in peace because the last thing I do is focus on Him at the close of each day.

Lent is a good time to thoughtfully and prayerfully cooperate with God. But once Easter ends each year, does it make sense to go on as if nothing happened? Because something definitely happened on Easter that should change the way I operate, not just for forty days, but permanently.

I don’t want to eat the proverbial red meat again. I think God has something better.