{LENT} She Did What She Could

Day 2 {LENT}

One thing I keep hearing... Surrender.

I love how God will dovetail various happenings in our life to say the same thing, making sure we get it.
In my women's study this week, as we go through the book of John, chapter by chapter, we finished up this Tuesday with the first portion of Chapter 12. My study book summed up the section by highlighting the the 'surrender' of Mary.

Her act of anointing His feet and unbinding her hair to wipe them... such a symbol of a

                                                          Surrendering Love

I've been asking 'What' to surrender to Him for Lent? 'What' to sacrifice?

  For a sacrifice is not just doing or giving something that is inconvenient,  but rather it requires a depraving of oneself  in order to honor and serve God (like Mary, taking the glory of her hair and using it for such a humble tool to wipe the oil and grit from His toes). Sacrifice..... stretches. It costs.

 And isn't that what the season of Lent is to be about? Being stretched out within to make room for Him?  Less of us, more of Him.  So, I've been asking, 'What' am I to deprive myself of to honor and make room for Him in these coming weeks?

Today He reminded me, it's less about the 'What' and more about the "Why".  The motive.

To give up something,  simply as a religious practice or an observance exercised, if done outside of the motivation of Love, "profits me nothing".  So this at least I know. Perhaps the 'what' is not yet decided, but the 'why'?

The 'why' is Love.

Though at times my love for Him reveals itself to be shallow, more concerned with gaining than giving, like Mary  I long to move from being one who sits and receives from Him, to one who rises in sacrificial love for Him,    and must pour out a gift right onto His feet.

He who loves...does.

Profession is easy, 

but the depth of our sincerity

is measured by our actions.

Also, still taking beauty and insight from the passage in 2 Chronicles 29-30:

"My sons, do not now be negligent, for the Lord has chosen you to stand in his presence, to minister to him and to be his ministers and make offerings to Him." (2 Chronicles 29:11)

After the king recites all the ways they, as a people,  have been negligent up until then, he challenges them to turn from this checkered past, and seize the 'now' before them.

I am so thankful that with the King there is always the call to the 'now'.
 
    "Forget the former things..."
    "Forgetting what is behind..." 

He calls us to live in the now, where He proclaims over each of us a grace that is sufficient.

Have you a checkered past, too? Is it filled, like my own journey, with starts and stops and shadowed with sin and shortcoming? (Remember we must, all our sin and shame only serve to highlight the depths to which his love and grace will reach to hold us)

He is calling us to lay aside the past and step into the Now with both feet. To practice a love for Him that both says and does, and even in our weakness, to 'make offerings to him."

May his words about me be what they were about the woman long ago, the one who sacrificed a love offering at His feet,  She did what she could.

(This is the second post in a series of forty as I journey through the days of Lent. Would you join me each day? Even start at Day one and read through,  as together we learn from Him.)
                                 

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