Lent

https://youtu.be/lKw6uqtGFfo?si=ss-FH6oTCC7cFBS2

“Any kind of leadership will involve opposition.
The greater the responsibility,
the more your troubles will multiply and your critics increase.”
~Nicky Gumble~

Much Madness is divinest Sense –
To a discerning Eye –
Much Sense – the starkest Madness –
‘Tis the Majority
In this, as all, prevail –
Assent – and you are sane –
Demur – you’re straightway dangerous –
And handled with a Chain –
~Emily Dickinson~

I shouldn’t feel slighted by the coming of spring, but I feel a bit cheated out of our typical Wisconsin winter. In our corner of the state, we just didn’t have the snowfall we are accustomed to expect, and I think it is the first winter I’ve not gone cross-country skiing since I first learned as a teenager. The week we had plenty of it, we were in Mexico. Where we did miss out on a polar vortex for the week, the majority of our weather felt bipolar what with its extreme weather swings. As transplants from the northern hinterlands of Wisconsin, the proverbial sentiment is that if it’s going to be cold, we may as well have snow, and plenty of it.

And so, I am feeling a bit bipolar, myself. A bit at odds—or ends—with my world these days, nonconformed and unwilling to yield to the pressures that exist about me and pressure me into being shaped by external expectations.

Conformity. We are always trying to fit in, within the bounds, the shape of what is expected, what we have learned, the rules, the grammar of behavior. It is a wearisome task.

Emily Dickinson was a nonconformist. Even in her writing style, her technical aspects would include dashes and capital letters mid sentence. But was she so very “dangerous” or rebellious, as her poem would suggest nonconformists to be?

In Lenten fashion, many are fasting during this forty weekday season, abstaining from something to detox our bodies and souls that our fast-paced schedules have fattened us with, in order that our relationship with God can be cleared of roadblocks, the dust and debris that pile up in the corners of our soul.

For myself, I am attempting to rid myself of Conformity. In Dickensonian style, I too can add hyphens to my heart’s content, capitals to my words mid-sentence, and throw caution to the wind as I “arabesque” and expand my soul to the outer reaches of my soul as I feast on His Word. As Lucy Maud Montgomery would say, “Let me taste of Your “perennial spring of youth” (After Many Days, p.202), drinking in the draughts of spring in this lencten-ing season. I need His perennial breath of spring to blow over my decaying perspectives and mindsets, the vestiges of winter that bore no snow.

In Good Boundaries and Goodbyes, Lysa TerKeurst admonishes us to “not be consumed with the grief of others not being pleased with us” (p.120) and to “not attach disappointment to your identity” (p.127). I too must learn to release others’ expectations of me, and I must be careful to not make up my own narrative of others’ thoughts toward me. Especially for those of us in leadership roles, that temptation to take on popular opinion can press heavily on our minds, but I must only attach my identity to that of Jesus Christ. In other words, the “majority” populace doesn’t get to decide what is acceptable or not: I have already been accepted, chosen, I am who You say I am, as the lyrics to the song above remind me. These are all ideologies that would conform me into a cultural or natural mold; the only thing we want to be conformed to is Jesus and His supernatural mold.

“But you are the ones chosen by God,
chosen for the high calling of priestly work,
chosen to be a holy people,
God’s instruments to do his work and speak out for him,
 to tell others of the night-and-day difference he made for you—
from nothing to something,
from rejected to accepted.”
~1 Peter 2:9-10 MSG~

“Stop imitating the ideals and opinions of the culture around you,
but be inwardly transformed by the Holy Spirit through a total reformation of how you think.”
~Romans 12:2, TPT~