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Isaiah 40:30-31
February 28, 2025 by Rebecca Littlejohn
DEVOTIONAL MESSAGE
Isaiah 40:30-31 – Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted; but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint. (NRSV)
I am fond of quoting one of my favorite writers, Kathleen Norris, when I explain why we should “do” Lent. Norris explains that we do Lent together at church every year, so that when a Lenten season arrives in our life, we’re ready for it, because we’ve practiced. What does it mean for a Lenten season to arrive in our life? It might be a time when it feels like we’re journeying through a hard way, without adequate resources, like Jesus fasting in the desert. It might be that the things we might sometimes choose to give up intentionally have been taken away without our consent. It might mean that joy has become hard to experience or express. A personal Lent is different for each of us.
But there are some fairly universal experiences in our modern life. One of them is exhaustion. The pace of our lives has simply taken on an inhuman speed these days, and we struggle to keep up. “Even youths will faint and be weary.” Sometimes we get to the point where we just have to stop doing all the things we thought we needed to do, and rest. In fact, Lent invites us to do just that.
Lent, as a season, can be a time when we intentionally remove certain things from our lives that normally command our time and attention. Maybe we give up Facebook or television. Or maybe, by adding in time for prayer each morning, we discover that the pace of the rest of the day feels different.
The rest aspect of Lent connects it to the practice of Sabbath. Like Sabbath, Lent reminds us of our mortal nature, helping us remember that God is God and we are not. We are not designed to be inexhaustible. We were not created to run 24/7. “He watching over Israel, slumbers not, nor sleeps,” the psalmist wrote, which means that we can, and we must! Often times it turns out that admitting our mortal nature in Lenten humility comes as a huge relief!