Day 21: Can we be done with Lent yet?

It's Monday. I got up and started the usual routine.  Got kids ready for school. Packed lunches.  Dropped everyone off. Inside,  I felt fragmented.  I didn't have a clear plan for the week,  just a lot of random to do that needed to be planned into the week. 

I looked forward to sitting at the dining room table in a quiet house to write out a week plan. I'm an avid bullet journalist.  Bullet journals mix art and planning as you doodle custom pages for to do lists,  goal tracking and visual notes.  For me,  accessing the free form creative side of my brain while planning allows me to be in touch with the bigger picture.... and to be honest,  it's the only art I have time to attempt to make. 

Zander and I arrived home and he immediately threw a fit almost to say, "Mooooooooom, it's so nice out.  We neeeeeeeeed to go to the park. " So,  I threw my journal and pens on top of the stroller, grabbed some headphones and we jogged to the park.

The park was empty.  Zander got busy running a loop around the playground.  I sat on a bench and pulled out my journal.  Almost on cue, Zander came up to me and whined to be picked up.  We played a bit and I packed him in the stroller and we headed off for groceries. 

Another jog and a stroller loaded down with produce later,  we arrived home.  Zander was asleep so my chance to plan in peace had arrived. I went to the stroller.  Gone.  My journal was gone.  I must have left it at the park.  

There wasn't enough time to get it before I picked up Miles,  so I got some house work and gardening done.

Inside my thoughts and emotions whirled.  I felt confused,  lost.  It wasn't about the week plan.  It was Lent.  Sometimes around the mid point I start feeling a little lost and today,  that feeling hit me,  right on time.  With my missing planner, emblematically serving as a cornerstone to the day. 

The world felt so big to me.  It felt like to much effort to do all the things - build a home,  build community,  serve the poor, donate,  give.  I felt called to something more than what I'm doing but all the more that is out there feels too big and I my time is so broken up by the demands of motherhood that I feel like couldn't give enough.  I felt ashamed.  I know there should be more. But how,  where,  what???

I always hope that I'll have a lenten discipline and do all the right things and God would just come down out of the sky and give me a mission or an orientation on how I should be viewing my life.  

But no... that's not how God usually works. That's not how Lent works.  Jesus fasted 40 days in the wilderness.  He was hungry.  The devil came with short cuts to faith.  Jesus saw through it. 

Faith isn't always clear or easy.  Sometimes it is wandering around blindly while we're over hungry and over tired only to emerge in the same place where we started. Faith is definitely not linear.  

So tonight,  when I'm not sure of where I'm going or what I'm doing or what this Lent is teaching me.  I'll pray the words of st Francis:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace:

where there is hatred, let me sow love;

where there is injury, pardon;

where there is doubt, faith;

where there is despair, hope;

where there is darkness, light;

where there is sadness, joy.

O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek

to be consoled as to console,

to be understood as to understand,

to be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive,

it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

Amen.