ONE FOOT AFTER ANOTHER

“Do not be surprised if you fall into sin, even that you fall every day. The great danger of sin comes not when we fall, but when we refuse to get up.”—Abba John of the Ladder

Lent is just long enough to be boring.

A week’s worth of Lent would produce a different crop of results. Everybody can persevere for a couple of days. Three days—a week, even—without television or two weeks without going to the movies—well, there’s not too much struggle in that. I can keep a New Year’s resolution longer. A chocolate-free two weeks might be just enough to convince me I have pretty impressive will-power. Maybe I can find a diet I’ll stick to after all.

Forty days finds most of my easy resolutions dropped somewhere behind me in the dust. I proved my point ten days ago: I can give up whatever I need to whenever I need to. That’s why I give stuff up, isn’t it? To test my will-power?

Will-power and Lent don’t really have much to do with each other—not much useful, anyway. If I fast for forty days, if I go without my favorite programs or sugar in my tea or even forty days without a taste of beef brisket (there’s a true Texas Lent!)—if I do all these things and tell myself come Easter Day, “I did it!” then it’s all better left undone.

Abba John says, “Don’t be surprised if you fall every day.” We don’t grow very much from our contests won, but those lost.

It’s not the falling, Abba says, but the getting up that matters. Far more Lents are dropped than “lost.” A lot of people give up on Lent, not because it’s too hard but because they’d rather do something else. Lent’s greatest lesson can be that the spiritual life we think we want just isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. Lent isn’t a spiritual sprint, but a spiritual plod: one day follows another, the drama of the Ashen Cross on our foreheads fades, it’s just not—well—interesting—any more.

Then Abba John’s words come to life: “the great danger is not falling, but refusing to get up.”

That’s the real contest of the spirit. Lent can prove of most value to me, not when I successfully keep it, not when I’ve mastered it, but when I lose it. When I fail, when I realize I could have kept my Lent successfully if I’d given up boiled okra rather than fried, then Lent’s real challenge presents itself.

The real question Lent poses is not “Is my will-power stronger than fried okra?” but “What do I do when I fall?”

Eating fried okra isn’t a sin, and I don't give it up to prove I can: it’s not a contest of will. It’s a gift. I offer to God all the uneaten fried okra I would have eaten for these forty days as my forty-day gift. We’re not giving up sin for forty days, like the Irish thief who refused to steal on fast days or the Italian prostitute who resolutely refused any Sunday fornication whatsoever. I give up my okra, not to prove I can but because, as much as I love okra, I love God more.

So in Lent, as in life, I plod along struggling with my temptations every step of the way. Sometimes I stumble. Well, usually I stumble. The stumblings other people will notice. The standings up are what God is watching for.

Plod, beloved.