If you have a longing for spiritual renewal, the observance of Lent presents a great opportunity to re-examine your life and recalibrate your soul.

Wednesday, February 22, is the first day of Lent. What is Lent? In the Christian tradition, Lent is a period of penitential preparation for Easter, which begins on Ash Wednesday in Western churches. Lent is observed for 40 days, like the fast of Jesus in the wilderness, and it traditionally focused on “fasting, prayer, and almsgiving.”

Respected British scholar, N. T. Wright, proposes that “Lent is a time for discipline, for confession, for honesty, not because God is mean or fault-finding or finger-pointing but because he wants us to know the joy of being cleaned out, ready for all the good things he now has in store.”

Lent is a time for repentance and a season for spiritual renewal. Perhaps over the past year you have neglected some of the important spiritual practices such as prayer, devotional reading, confession, thanksgiving, and worship participation. Maybe you have made poor ethical or moral decisions. Or possibly you have grown inactive or dormant in our spiritual walk.

Lent is a great time to reconnect, recommit, and reengage. To maximize the opportunity to deepen your spiritual walk, consider refreshing your devotional life (including prayer and Bible reading). In addition to the hard print devotional books, there are many online devotional options available for your Lenten reading. Here are a few examples:

• MorningStar- Living Lent Campaign – Morningstar (morningstarcfs.org)
• Journey to the Cross-  d365 Daily Devotionals
• Pittsburgh Theological Seminary- Lent Devotionals (pts.edu)
• Today Devotional- Devotions about Lent – Today Daily Devotional
• Sacred Space- Sacred Space | Your daily prayer online

Lent is also a time to prioritize our participation in worship. Worship is not only a time to gather with others to offer prayer, praise, and thanksgiving. Worship is a time encourage others along their journey and to allow others to encourage you. Consistent involvement in worship leads to a reshaping of our perspective and a realignment of our priorities.

Walter Brueggemann contends that Lent leads us exit an anxious way of life and to embrace a more simple way of life: “I imagine Lent for you and for me as a great departure from the greedy, anxious anti-neighborliness of our economy, a great departure from our exclusionary politics that fears the other, a great departure from self-indulgent consumerism that devours creation. And then an arrival in a new neighborhood, because it is a gift to be simple, it is a gift to be free; it is a gift to come down where we ought to be.”

So, where do we begin? Perhaps we begin by praying the words of Psalm 139:23-24: “Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.”

(Barry Howard serves as the pastor at the Church at Wieuca in Atlanta, Georgia. He also serves as a leadership coach and columnist for the Center for Healthy Churches. He and his wife Amanda currently reside in Brookhaven, Georgia.)