I like Lent. For some reason, this year seems to be the time to criticize the season’s growing popularity among evangelicals, particularly from those in my own theological tradition, but I still like it. The critiques are generally pretty valuable and on-target; there are and have long been a great many bad reasons and bad ways to observe Lent, and endorsing it probably ought always to be accompanied by plenty of caveats.

Setting aside the controversy, Peter Leithart articulates well what I like about it: “Lent is a minor movement in the symphony of the church year, dissonance that opens into the resolution of Easter.” There’s an aesthetic to it; the year isn’t flat, with an uninterrupted sequence of normal weeks and Sundays punctuated (maybe) by Christmas and Easter. That’s not how God set up the seasons in the natural world, and I think it’s fitting that the church year reflect that as it helps us walk through the gospel story.

For those of us here in the northern hemisphere, there is something else I like about that: Lent happens as winter becomes spring, a minor-key liturgical season in a major-key natural season. Advent prepares us for light in the dark of winter; Lent tempers the light and warmth of springtime with sober meditation on Christ’s journey into darkness.

It’s a reminder, in that way, that what we see and feel and experience right here and right now isn’t the whole story. The joy of Easter was won on the cross; the Lord didn’t want Paul to grow conceited, so he allowed a thorn in his flesh; we enter the kingdom of God only through many tribulations. But none of these things (the cross, the thorn, the tribulations) is final; they are dependent on the resurrection, the revelation, and the kingdom for their meaning. Today’s affliction isn’t comparable to the coming, ultimate joy.

I’m a missionary raising support, and so my temptation is to read each day’s experience as though it were the final word: a church that seemed so interested can’t support us after all, and I think our work in Germany was a ridiculous pipe dream all along; a big, unexpected pledge comes in, and I think we’ll be there next week; I tell the same stories and make the same plea a hundred times, sometimes with success, sometimes without, and I feel the only way to survive is to flatten it all out into a job, something that just goes on until it stops, not a story with conflict and obstacles and a divinely ordained ending.

But keeping Lent, if only by reading more about suffering and repentance in my Bible than usual, tunes my heart to hear the minor movements of the year (or the day, or the week) with an ear toward the triumphant conclusion. It tells me that I am in a season, and seasons change – that’s just about all they do. But it tells me that the Christ who suffered is the Lord Jesus who reigns, too, and that the Christ who reigns is the Jesus who suffered. He is the same yesterday, and today, and forever.

-Ben