I saw my first daffodils of spring today. They were growing unassumingly on the side of Cat Square Road. I don’t know if someone planted them there on purpose, but there they were, pops of yellow in the gray brown.
I’m glad it was Ash Wednesday when I saw them.
As much as we lean into the mortality and sacrifice of Lent, it is a season about growth, about community, and about healing. For rural communities, this may be more helpful that the watered down fasts the folks so often follow. Fasts that get broken or stripped of meaning just to say “we’re doing it.”
Lent is the reminder that in the midst of the cold and death, hope irrupts. In the isolation of what feels like such a lonely world, community can gather. In the violence, pain, and grief of a world that seems to only want to take, manipulate, or violate, healing can emerge.
May we be reminded, that Christianity offers hope through its power to transform sin into beauty, and suffering into joy.
May Lent be a time to meditate on this.
Jonathan LeMaster-Smith 
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