The Pastor's Pen

The Pastor's Pen is a weekly devotional space where our pastor, as well as staff members on occasion, offer reflections, spiritual insights, and words of encouragement rooted in Scripture and everyday life. These writings are intended to challenge, inspire, and draw us closer to God and to one another as we strive to live out our faith with boldness and compassion. Whether offering comfort, conviction, or a call to action, each column invites us into deeper discipleship and shared community. When The Columns does not run, there is not a new entry for The Pastor's Pen.

Along the journey... | Feb. 19, 2026

What is Lent?


Easter, not Christmas, is the highest holy day in the Christian faith. To celebrate Easter in a vacuum, without walking the long road to the resurrection, robs the day of its true impact.


Fred Craddock, the great 20th-century preaching professor, said, “Anticipation is its own gift.” Imagine Christmas morning without Advent, without the monthlong period of looking forward to gifts and food and the glow of little faces and time with family and friends. Christmas Day comes like any other. Like it was January 17 or February 8. It’s just another day that leaves us as abruptly as it arrives, while we ask, “Hey Sally, what’s today’s date?”


Advent and Lent are the mechanisms in the life of the church that prevent this. Like its sibling season before it, that helps us ready for Christmas, Lent helps us anticipate Easter. Anticipation is its own gift, and the gift multiplies like the fishes and loaves when Easter arrives at the end of 40 days of intention. Lent is a season that has been too often misused and abused by the church. While it is true that Lent is a solemn and penitential season centered around self-denial ahead of Good Friday’s cross, Lent is not a season exempt from the grace of the gospel. Lent is not a season for self-loathing, but an honest recognition of our human frailty held in the merciful embrace of God.


A few years ago, Marie Kondo grabbed the media’s attention with her work on

simplification and simplicity. Christians have had two seasons built into every year for nearly 2,000 years to work toward a similar goal. We simplify in Lent as a way of pushing aside things that are taking up too much space in our lives, too much bandwidth in our hearts and minds. Then, we choose to sit with the dissonance and discomfort of our fast and invite it to call our attention to God. The fast creates a hunger. The hunger cues us to pray. The prayer molds us and makes us.


Over the course of a lifetime, one Lent at a time, we discover that something is

always being sold to us as indispensable, and that it seldom ever is. One Lent at a time, we are invited to practice turning our attention again to God, who is what the latest fad only claims to be. These forty days are an invitation. How will you respond?


~ Rev. Zach Bay