Try this Cool New Tool for Lent!
Friends! Lent is beginning this week, as in Ash Wednesday, as in let’s prepare our hearts for Easter! (Someone please tell me where January went?!!)
In a recent email, a book was recommended to me. I quickly put it on my Kindle because its’ title piqued my curiosity:
40 Days of Decrease: A Different Hunger, a Different Fast by Alicia Britt Chole.
While we technically don’t need to start reading it until February 22nd, I got a jump on it so I could tell YOU about it in the event you’d be interested in reading it in these days leading up to Easter.
Alicia has authored several books and has also received her doctorate of ministry in leadership and spiritual formation, serving as founding Director of Leadership Investment Intensives (www.leadershipii.com), a non-profit “devoted to providing customized soul-care for leaders in business and ministry.”
40 Days of Decrease has a boatload of notable endorsers, i.e. Mark Batterson, Kay Arthur, Jennifer Rothschild and Ken Boa, just to name a few. Let’s hear from Mark and Ken:
“Alicia has a unique way of framing truth. Her heartfelt and thoughtful words penetrate the soul and make you think in new ways.” Mark Batterson, Lead Pastor of National Community Church, Washington, D.C.
“I first encountered Alicia Britt Chole through her profound book, Anonymous, and I am delighted to see this new companion to nurturing our life together in the Spirit. 40 Days of Decrease is a unique and original approach to the traditional preparation for the climax of Easter. The daily “Reflection” and “Today’s Fast” components are gems. The 40 distinct fasts she proposes offer a transformational praxis that redefines the meaning of hunger.” Ken Boa, President of Reflection Ministries, author of Conformed to His Image
I love this book for a number of reasons. Alicia thinks of ideas for fasts I’d have never come up with in a million years. Note that Mark’s and Ken’s endorsement both include the word “unique”— That’s why I’m so enamored with this book.
Two favorite quotes grab us early in the Prologue:
“We all guard against sins of commission and we are vigilant toward sins of omission. But achievements—even in small doses—can make us vulnerable to sins of addition: adding niceties and luxuries to our list of basic needs, adding imaginations onto the strong back of vision, adding self-satisfaction to the purity of peace.”
Alicia closes the Prologue with this:
“Throughout our collective 40 Days of Decrease, let us rest assured that when Father God calls us to fast increase, decrease will purify our souls.”
In the Introduction, we learn from Alexander Schmemann (who wrote Great Lent), “The purpose of Lent is not to force on us a few formal obligations, but to ‘soften’ our heart so that it may open itself to the realities of the spirit, to experience the hidden ‘thirst and hunger’ for communion with God.”
Day 1 tells us right away we should “consider Lent as less of a project and more of a sojourn.”
Alicia adds,
Note the “thinning and thickening concepts.” Yes, well that surely makes us think!
Last night we had dinner with friends from Pittsburg and we were all talking about what we knew friends had given up for Lent in the past: Chocolate, meat on Fridays (enter the Friday Night Fish Fry!), etc. All four of us agreed the things to give up were just that: things, not concepts as Alicia’s book suggests.
One of my many favorite fasts of the 40 in the book is for us to “Fast regret.”
I’m the Queen of “Shoulda Coulda Woulda” and I can get in a regretful funk, fussing at myself over something which makes for a huge, colossal waste of time and does nobody any good. Case in point: While in Naples, our middle son, Gordy and his wife, Lauren, and their sons, Henry and Mills, visited for a weekend.
We had a blast with them but the time went way too fast and I caught myself saying, “Oh we should’ve done this, or why didn’t we do this?, or blah, blah, blah…”. Then I was kicking myself until I read Day 2 in Alicia’s book. Take a gander at this:
Now there’s a warning! Read on:
“Regret empties anticipation,
Flattens dreams, and
Suffocates hope, because regret is a form of self-punishment.”
“Whereas hindsight helps us learn from the past, regret beats us up with the past.”
“So for one entire day (or go for forty!), I invite you to fast regret.
DO NOT FEED IT.
DO NOT GIVE IT SOLACE.
LET IT GO: God’s mercies are new every morning.” (Lamentations 3:23)
I constantly stand amazed at God’s timing. I was reading Day 2 the day after Gordy and family flew home. I said out loud: “Ok, Lord, I hear you loud and clear.” To which I’m sure my better half is STILL beyond elated as he, poor thing, had to listen to my litany of regrets!
Another one of my favorite fasts is Day 12: “Fast isolation.”
Alicia reminds us of a scene from the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, where Clarence, the visiting angel to George Bailey (played by Jimmy Stewart), takes him to a graveyard. Clarence shows George his younger brother’s grave.
George is aghast and argues, “No! That’s not right! Harry didn’t die at age 9! He went to war and won the Congressional Medal of Honor! He saved the lives of every man on that transport!”
To which Clarence replies, “Every man on that transport died because Harry wasn’t there to save them because YOU weren’t there to save Harry!…Each man’s life touches so many other lives.”
And then we all cry buckets of tears seeing George realize the “vast network of people his valuable life has affected.” What a wonderful, huge “aha!” moment!
What’s even wilder is that while It’s a Wonderful Life came out in 1947, two whole decades earlier, in 1929, a Hungarian writer by the name of Frigyes Karinthy wrote a short story called “Chain-Links”, postulating a theory known as Six Degrees of Separation. We all know from connecting with others there always seems to be a lot LESS than six degrees of separation!
Alicia says, “Spiritually, the theory highlights the truth that each life needs and, in turn, affects all other lives.” Which is precisely why Day 12, “Fast isolation,” encourages us to not stay home alone, but to meet a friend for coffee or a walk, or lunch, or dinner, refusing “to discount your influence, especially in small acts, and intentionally nurture your God-given web of relationships.”
My Wednesday Bible study group is outstanding at holding each other accountable. Each of the eight of us knows if we don’t show up, we’ll be getting a phone call or a text or someone will come knocking at our door! Isolation is not in our vocabulary!
I love how Alicia begins Day 12 because she shows us in the Bible where Jesus heals the blind man, Bartamaeus, and then soon afterwards, He meets Zaccheus. She reminds us these two men lived in the same town and perhaps celebrated their faith together after their interactions with Jesus. Fun thought, regardless!
So while I’ve only shared three of the 40 Days of Decrease, I pray you may wish to dive in yourselves to read an entry each day during Lent.
One final note about this book: Each of the 40 days’ entries also include extensive history lessons on Lent itself. These follow the “Reflection” and “Today’s Fast” sections, concluding with “Today’s Reading” portions from the Bible. To say each entry is thorough is an understatement! (You can read the whole thing or just pick and choose your favorite parts.)
Now you know how we like to close: “Run! Don’t walk, to your nearest bookstore and begin your Lenten season a whole new way with 40 Days of Decrease: A Different Kind of Hunger: A Different Kind of Fast.”
‘Til next time!
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