One of the things I give up every year for Lent is pop (many of you know this as soda or "Coke"). There are various reasons I do this, the two main ones being that it's difficult to do and that it's something I have too much of.
But I've been thinking about how pop also serves as the perfect metaphor for Lent as well. Pop is marketed to those who are thirsty and yet its ingredients insure that those who drink it will only be thirstier. It promises to fill you up, but is full of nothing that actually satisfies. It's like drinking a bottle full of empty, but still feeling full.
And that's what the season of Lent asks us to stop doing. We aren't meant to arbitrarily eliminate something from our schedules or diets, but to purposefully have less of something that is making us feel full while simultaneously making us more empty. It may be shopping, it may be food, it may be facebook, but we all have something empty that we're getting too much of. And that's what Lent is meant to help us have less of.
But the point of Lent isn't simply to have less of a bad thing, but more of a good thing; and that good thing is God. God whose fullness actually fills us and doesn't simply make us feel full. God whose fullness may begin with emptiness, but only as a way to cleanse and to make room.
The fact is that we all take in something that is fairly shallow or even empty. We give those things up for Lent in order to have less of them and more of God. The idea(l) is for the principles of Lent to carry over into life. Because, while it's true that a Coke a week won't hurt you, a lifetime of filling up on emptiness will destroy you completely.
