Lent can be a long stretch of time for some of us. From every
corner comes the call to repent - the exhortation to make a
full accounting of our sins, to see our messes in the light
of day. Some of us are very good at that. Some of us go to
the desert with Jesus, intending to spend Lent in His
company, and we get distracted by the devil.
We hear all sorts of temptations. Beginning with the simple
recounting of a conversation gone awry or a stray thought of
envy, we are led to evaluate and analyze each conversation of
the day or every spoken word or fleeting thought this week. I
should have said that differently. I should have held my
tongue altogether there. I should not have spent so much time
lingering in that coffee shop, clicking through Facebook.
From there, we think of the to-do list with more than half
its items yet unchecked. We remember the dust bunnies under
the bed, the clothes at the bottom of the hamper, the fact
that we called for takeout twice last week.
And now, the tempter in the desert is hissing loudly in our
ears. Not good enough. Not patient enough. Not organized
enough. Not diligent enough. The hissing reaches a wild,
unfettered crescendo. Not enough. Never enough. Never will be
enough.
The accuser is taking up residence inside our heads, and he
is speaking to us in our own voices. We hear him talking; the
things he's saying - we are allowing him to say - are things
we'd never say to another person. We'd never be so unkind,
never be so accusatory, never be so relentless. Somehow,
though, the self-evaluation of this season has given way to
well-entrenched habits of self-recrimination. We talk to
ourselves inside our heads in ways that would astonish people
who hear us speak aloud.
The enemy has taken up residence, and it's his voice that is
drowning out God's. God calls to repentance along the path to
forgiveness. The devil just holds us in the bottleneck of
accusing. There is no progression to reconciliation. Again
and again, he accuses. His voice, if we let it, grows so loud
that we can't hear our own, and we certainly can't hear
God's. All we can hear are the dark lies of the serpent.
The light is on for us.
In the quiet of the confessional, we speak aloud the fruits
of our genuine examinations of conscience. Then we hear aloud
the words of His forgiveness. Forgiven. Finished.
Stop the internal conversation. The things which are truly
sins have been forgiven by the Savior on the cross. The rest
of that incessant babble in our heads? The accusations that
tell us we aren't good enough for God? Not sins at all. Those
are the words of the devil.
Fresh from the confessional we replace those words with His
word.
"So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation:
Everything old has passed away; see, everything has become
new. All this is from God, who reconciled us to Himself
through Christ and has given us the ministry of
reconciliation; that is, in Christ, God was reconciling the
world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them,
and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. So we are
ambassadors for Christ, since God is making His appeal
through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled
to God. For our sake He made Him to be sin who knew no sin,
so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God. (1
Cor 5:17-21)
Every time the evil one hisses lies inside our heads, we
square our shoulders and speak confidently, "I am a new
creation." Every time, until it fills the spaces where the
lies once festered.
And the silence of Christ's peace will be our Easter joy.
Foss, whose website is elizabethfoss.com, is a
freelance writer from Northern Virginia.