For those of you who grew up in a church, Lent may have been a time when you gave up chocolate - all the better to enjoy the chocolate Easter bunny in your basket when it was over! Lent was about giving something up, a discipline, and sometimes an exercise in just how strong-willed you could be.

Lent can be like that. It can be about giving up the things we love and think we can't live without. For some of us, what we end up proving to ourselves after the 6 weeks of the season is that it's true! We really can't live without it. And so, we either give up on fasting from it - there's little guilt in that! - or count the Sundays as "little Easters" and indulge. We admire the ones who are able to stick with a fast and wish we could be so determined.

It can be really easy to make Lent into being about how strong - or not! - we are and not as much about how trustworthy our God is. It's not too hard to wipe off the sooty cross from Ash Wednesday and forget about our dependence on God for everything. Not hard at all to return to counting on our own selves and our own abilities alone. But that's really what Lent is about. Lent is about coming face to face with the truth of God's constant and abundant presents. Peel away everything we count as our own doing, and it's what's at the bedrock. In Lent we admit and submit to this.

On the Wednesdays and Sundays of Lent we'll be recalling that we're in a long line of people who have learned to depend on God's abundant presence and so, the theme for this year is "Bread for the Journey". I hope you'll make it a 6-week habit to be present at both the mid-week and Sunday worship. This is a sensory experience as well as a spiritual one. Come journey with me - we always have plenty to teach each other about living as folks who are led by Jesus.