Holiday

The season of Lent official started on Ash Wednesday, two days ago. Lent is a season where we prepare our hearts and our minds to enter into the wonderful Mystery of Easter. It’s a reflective season that often includes taking on or giving up certain practices to help us focus on our faith and relationship with God. It’s an important season, but it’s also one that can get easily get swallowed up by an early jump into Easter. With a little intentionality, however, it can be a meaningful experience for families to walk through together

But if you’re like me, these opportunities for intentionality *always* sneak up on you. It isn’t that you didn’t know the beginng of Lent was around the corner. It’s just that work and school and laundry and someone always being sick because it’s winter ALSO happened, and all of your good plans to pull together a family practice slipped away in the craziness of your ordinary life and, well, now Lent is here and you never actually got anything prepared. And now it feels like it’s too late.

It’s not too late.

No, seriously, hear me: IT’S NOT TOO LATE!

I’m preaching to myself as much as anyone, because I struggle with this, too. I LOVE a fresh start from what feels like a natural (or an actual) beginning, but my goal for this year is to not let perfection be the enemy of the good. My choices are not do something perfectly or to not do it at all.

That means you CAN start your Advent readings on December 4th. You CAN create charitable giving goals in February (or March, or July!). You CAN start regularly attending church, or the gym, or that community action group in April, even though you meant to start going on January 1. And you can DEFINITELY create a Lent & Easter countdown chain on the 3rd day or 2nd week of Lent (or on Good Friday!) and it’s all good.

Having a visual way for your family to journey through the season of Lent together can be extremely helpful for kids. The start date for Lent varies widely and other, more commercially notable holidays like Valentine’s Day and St. Patrick’s Day, often fall in the middle of it, making the season a little extra confusing for kids.

And because Lent itself has largely NOT been commercially co-opted (which is a good thing!) it also means that Lenten visuals are sometimes hard to come by. You probably aren’t going to find Lenten banners or window decorations at your local Target.

So a Lenten calendar (like this one or any of these!) or a paper countdown chain are easy ways to help mark the time of the connected Lent and Easter seasons.

Did I mention easy? You probably have most of these materials at your house right now. Basically all you need is paper and glue (or tape or staples work great/even better, too).

I created this paper chain for church using the supplies we had on hand in the craft supply closet. Yours can be fancier or simpler than mine.

The season of Lent is 40 days long lasting from Ash Wednesday to Holy Saturday (Lent does not include Sundays in the counting of the 40 days. Obviously my chain does not have 40 links, but yours certainly can. I went for a quicker route and while some links represent specific holy days, most just represent a WEEK of the season.

Here’s how mine is constructed:

Black link– Ash Wednesday
6 purple links–the 6 weeks of Lent (the traditional color for the season of Lent is purple)
Black link–Good Friday (or Holy Week as a whole)
7 white links–the 7 weeks of the season of Easter
Red Link-Pentecost Sunday

If you wanted to make a link for each chain you would need:

Black link– Ash Wednesday
38 purple links–the days in Lent (could intersperse white links if you wanted to mark Sundays)
2 Black links-Good Friday and Holy Saturday
49 white links–the days in the season of Easter
Red Link-Pentecost Sunday, the end and 50th day of Eastertide

The dove at the top is just my fancy chain holder and decoration. You could make yours a cross, a flower, a hand-lettered sign, or nothing at all.

I added a loop of string so I could easily hang the countdown chain.

That’s it! To visualize your journey through the seasons, simply tear off a link as each day/week passes or take a clothespin and move it to each link.

Want your countdown chain to help you or your family participate in Lent & Easter faith practices? Consider writing on each link (before you glue the chain together!) and then reading it as you remove each link.

Your links could contain:

names of people, please or topics to pray for
random acts of kindness to participate in
Scripture passages or Bible stories to read together (like this one that uses the Jesus Storybook Bible)
a small area of your house to declutter (with the intention to donate excess to charity!)
a friend or family member to surprise with a note in the mail (or young kids could draw a picture)

But again, keep it simple. Something is better than nothing. You could always decide on the person to pray for each day and write his or her name on the link AFTER you remove it from the chain. (Or do the same with acts of kindness!) Keep the removed links in a jar or plastic bag and look back over them at the end of the season.

If you make a Lent and Easter countdown chain send me a pic! I’d love to add photos of additional examples to the end of this post!

(Want to do a family faith practice for Lent or Easter but this one just doesn’t appeal to you? Stay tuned. More ideas to come!)

The pressure to be loving at Christmas time is intense. We feel like we’re supposed to love the holiday season itself. Love the music. Love the lights. Love the parties. Love the worship services. Love the gifts.

We feel pressure to get together with our loved ones. All of them. Even when our schedules are full and our bodies are exhausted. Even the loved ones we don’t actually like. Even the ones who don’t like us. We feel pressure to show our love to each other through gifts-the shinier the better. Love is supposedly just all around us, infusing into us and out of us in the form of perfect Instagram photos, sparkly decorations and homemade gifts.

The truth is that for many of us, love is the hardest emotion to deal with around the holiday season. We feel a lot of things, but love seems out of our reach. We feel the ache and longing for a friend of family member that has died. We feel the pain of a relationship that is broken. We feel the disappointment of unmet expectations and crushed dreams. We feel the fear of uncertain futures. We feel a lot of things this time of year, but it’s possible that none of them are love. Maybe we even feel the opposite.

I discovered this week that there is apparently a raging debate on the Internet about what the opposite of love actually IS. Many people hold the traditional view that the opposite of love is hate. That animosity, cruelty, ill-will are the farthest you can get from true love. And those emotions can certainly come into play at Christmas time. I’ve seen and heard of families doing some cruel things to each other around the holidays. And as sad as it is, hatred in the form of wars, massacres, battles and murders are certainly no stranger to the holiday season.

Others tend more toward the thoughts of holocaust survivor Ellie Weisel, who said that the opposite of love is indifference. That the farthest thing away from the energy of love is the emptiness of apathy. I think many of us have experience with this around the Christmas season as well. We don’t feel love, but our hearts aren’t filled with hate. I mean, who even has the ENERGY to be hateful this time of year? Instead, what we feel is nothing. To protect ourselves from pain and loss, and uncertainty and loneliness we instead choose not to feel anything at all. We can’t care about anyone or anything because it hurts too much. We are too hurt, our world feels too dangerous, our future seems too scary and so we fall into numbness, to apathy, to indifference to protect us from it all.

Perhaps both are true. Perhaps the opposite of love is simply “not love.” When you are exhausted, apathetic, wounded, fearful, hateful, angry or mourning, love can feel beyond your grasp. Because actually loving each other, and loving ourselves. is hard. Really, really, really hard. Nothing makes that more apparent than the sparkly, glitzy, consumeristic, eat-drink-and-be merry, Faux Love we find peddled so heavily during the holidays. Because when we are surrounded by fake love, it is easy to see where real love is lacking.

Because real Love is patient; real Love is kind; real Love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. Real Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; Real love does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. (Sound familiar?)

It’s an incredible description–bordering on impossible.

Last week my kids and I watched Charlie Brown Christmas Tales on Netflix. In one scene Lucy comes up to Charlie Brown and Says “Merry Christmas Charlie Brown! At this time of year I think we should try to put aside all of our differences and try to be kind.” And Charlie Brown, looking at Lucy who bullies him most of the year says “Why does it have to be just this time of year? Why can’t it be all year round!” And Lucy balks “What are you? Some kind of fanatic!”

And that’s the truth isn’t it? Unlimited kindness and unconditional love is fanatical isn’t it? It’s why “let’s just smile and get along for the holidays” feels so awful–because love is never meant to stop and start.

Love is meant to be unrelenting., never ceasing, never failing. The Gospel, the Good news is that God is LOVE. That Jesus Christ came into the world as Love Incarnate, Love in the flesh to show us what a life of Love–what a kingdom of love looks like. And we need it now more than ever. In ourselves, in our families, in our churches, in our communities and in our world. We need Love as a radical act of resistance against the false gospels of power, wealth, pride, selfishness and winning.

Love will be the hardest thing we ever do. It will be the most vulnerable thing we ever do. Nothing makes you more open to hurt than being patient, kind, humble, caring, and peaceful. Ask Jesus. Love got him killed. But love is also what has saved and is saving us all.

It can feel all too big though. How can you love in the midst of all the chaos, all the anti-love, all the exhaustion, all the pain? How can you love when you don’t feel loving or even feel loved? As it turns out there is only one way to love, no matter if we are talking about loving our broken families, our rotting political systems, our fractured countries, or are wounded selves. We can only way in small ways. We can only love by choosing to do the next right thing. By choosing kindness, choosing peace, choosing patience, choosing humility, choosing to put others needs before own. Or as Mother Teresa said, “We can do not great things–only small things with great love.”

We cannot protect ourselves from pain. It is a universal part of the human experience. But the good news of the Gospel is that pain and love are NOT opposites. They can and do co-exist in this life. Mother Teresa called it a paradox. “I have found the paradox,” she said, “that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.” The radicalness of true love is that it can co-exist with our pain. The good news of Christmas is that the God who is Love Incarnate is with us in our hurt, in our loss, in our indifference and in our suffering– in the holiday seasons of Advent and Christmas and always.

Category: Holiday

Lent & Easter Paper Countdown Chain

The Opposite of Love During the Holidays