I asked Josh Becker as a junior high youth leader to put together a reflection on lent each week...here is his first.
Return to the Lord
So as I sit here having just read this weeks passage and thinking about the theme for the week. Two things struck me
1) Is that in the 12th verse of Joel 2 the Lord says "Return to me now, while there is time!" Fancy that, it is our theme for the week.
2) Is how as a prophet Joel's entire goal was to get Israel to return to the Lord. To bring them back from their wanderings and have them turn their eyes back to the Lord.
The act of turning seems to me to show a first time commitment or understanding. Where as the act of returning has the significance of a repeated action. Meaning that we have turned towards the Lord and that something has caused us to turn away making it so we need to RE-turn or turn back to the Lord. That I think is our first step in Lent. Recognizing that we have turned from the Lord and that there is a need to RE-turn to Him.
This RE-turning to the Lord isn't a casual "turn left at the next light" sort of turn, it's not a "veer right here" sort of turn. If anything it's a "Make a U-turn immediately" sort of turn. It is an understanding that we must shift our views from whatever has caused us to stray over the year back to the holiness and glory that is our Lord. This first week I challenge myself to make the sort of turn that leaves tires squealing and your knuckles white as they grip the steering wheel.
Well, I suppose that these passages are appropriate for Lent in that it is a time of reflection for us as Christians and also a time of mourning the death of Christ and reflecting on our sins and how our sins brought Christ to earth to suffer and die. That's, in a nutshell my basic understanding of the meaning of Lent.