Today, March 5, is Ash Wednesday. So begins our 40 day (plus Sundays) journey of Lent!

(Just in case Lent is new to you—it was to me a few years ago!—here’s a short video to introduce it.)

Each year, many Christians use Lent as a time to refocus through the Big Three practices of Fasting, Praying and Giving. (More on that here.) And each year I’ve had a sense of what God was inviting me to fast from—certain foods, media, dining out, etc. (Never coffee. God loves me too much to ask that, right?)

But this year I wasn’t sure. I started Ash Wednesday without a chosen fast, and was waiting on God to show me what would be helpful for me right now. And the answer I got was surprising.

This year, God is inviting me to fast from self-reliance.

You see, I’ve always thought of myself as a fairly needy person. I feel things deeply, and walk a thin line between health and anxiety or depression. My closest friends know that I need a lot of reassurance and comfort. This has always seemed like a failure, weakness, shame.

But recently God has been challenging that view for me. And today, as I sat to pray, God invited me to use a single word: “Help!” Not because I’m so shockingly weak. Not because I’m a failure. Not because I can’t pull it together on my own. No—ask help, God said, because that’s how I made you. Needing help is normal.

Kids understand this. They come to their parents for shoes to be tied, homework to be explained, monsters to be chased out from under beds, straws to be stabbed into their juice boxes. Children in supportive homes aren’t often ashamed to ask for help.

Lent is not a time when we fast, pray and give to make ourselves stronger on our own. It’s not a time we prove we’re spiritual athletes, heroes who can endure harsh conditions. Rather, it’s a time when set aside our illusions of self-reliance and independence—or our shame at needing help—and press into the love of our Father who loves to give.

I’m embodying this fast by spending 15 minutes a day sitting quietly before God, with my simple prayer: “Help!” And something tells me, that’s the most grown-up prayer I’ll have offered in a long time.

We are excited to share that Good Dirt: Lent, Holy Week & Eastertide is now available! In this second volume, seasonal activities and readings guide families through a journey with Jesus in his life, death, and resurrection as he invites us to follow him as his disciples.

The season of Lent starts March 5 with Ash Wednesday. This devotional will lead you through to the end of Eastertide at Pentecost.

You can download a free PDF of the book, or order a physical copy from Amazon.

Thanks to everyone for going on this journey with us!

Gratitude requires steely-eyed attention. We are never grateful for abstractions. We are grateful for particular events, persons, actions, beauties, “what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands.” (To borrow from the First Epistle of John.) Gratitude is always told in the form of a story—my story.

Why is that I am tempted to give thanks for broad-brush generalities? I expect to be asked today to rattle of a litany of thanks. And like many of you, I find it easy to turn to tried-and-true gestures that no one can get their hands or head around: God’s grace. Family. Second chances. You know the drill.

There’s nothing wrong with being thankful for God’s grace—except we’re never thankful for “God’s grace” as a sweeping concept. When we feel thanks, it is for concrete, messy, hands-on stuff. Stuff that can’t be said in a word or two, but requires a narrative.

I don’t know about “God’s grace.” But I know that recently in the midst of a truly rough day, a friend called, and came over, and we ate dessert and laughed and watched a movie and hugged, and I was surprised to feel hopeful and able to face a painful situation again. It was a gift—a gift of friendship, but also of strength and hope.

In The Divine Conspiracy, Dallas Willard writes, “You are not separate from your life, and in that life you must find the goodness of God. Otherwise you will not believe that he has done well by you, and you will not truly be at peace with him.” This, Dallas notes, takes work, time, training.

Gratitude is a disciplined, watchful eye over our actual lives for evidence that we have, beyond any reasonable expectation, been included in the life of God. It is hard work. We are trained to observe and note failure, loss, evidence that our world, our life, our body as they are could never house the glory of God. And then, to our befuddlement, there he is.

So, let’s look closely. Let’s take up the magnifying glass of faith and examine the mess of our experience, asking: what is God up to? Where have I seen him? Where does his absence beckon me further than I have been willing to go? Where does conflict invite me to love more deeply than I have dared? Where has sorrow invited me into greater hope than I thought possible? And where has joy sustained me along the way?

And then tell a story.

The print and PDF versions of Good Dirt: Advent, Christmastide & Epiphany are now available! The PDF is a free download available here. Print copies are at Amazon.com.

We are so excited to journey with you this year, starting with Advent on December 1st!

Good Dirt is a year long adventure for families desiring to grow in Christ and set the rhythm of their lives by the Seasons of the Church. Good Dirt will walk with families through a year of living the Seasons through family activities and information. Each day the family is rooted to Christ through a reading from one of the Gospels. Families will learn how to “Till,” “Plant,” “Water,” and “Weed” their own souls and the little souls that are in their home. Families will not only read about spiritual formation, but will live it out within the greatest social context any human is ever born into: their family. Over the duration of a year, families will practice the spiritual disciplines including the twelve disciplines that Richard Foster writes about in Celebration of Discipline and also others.