Lint Lent

Lint. Lent. Lint is the detritus in your dryer that gets caught in a trap. It seems like lint in a dryer could interfere with the airflow of the drying system. And if you leave too much of it in the lint trap, it can catch on fire and cause all kind of horrible problems. You must continually, every time, clean out the lint trap.

Lent is a time to check our spiritual lint traps. What detritus is interfering with the flow of God's grace through our lives? Lent is the time to clear out the lint.

As I listened to Monty preach last Wednesday about lint and Lent (he actually threw lint at us, to make a point -- the man must have been collecting it for quite some time), I thought about the spiritual discipline of denial during Lent. Many people will ask, "What are you giving up for Lent?" My husband has a very specific discipline he's practicing, as does a friend of ours. Mine is very amorphous (and I'm not having very good luck with it at all). As I thought about what they were "giving up," I was inspired by their symbolic lint trap cleaning.

There have been times in life when I practiced a discipline of "giving up." There was a real sense to it of a symbolic action clearing the trap to allow grace to flow. I'm missing that.