The Rescue Journey

Lent, 2025

Yesterday I introduced a rescue journey. Here’s a brief recap:

A long, slow journey. 40 days. Every turn in the path “a response to God’s invitation for us to be joined to Christ in every part of our lives” (Miles Werntz, Christianity Today).

Lent is the journey. Lent is a fancy word, with a set of old practices, describing a rescue, every decision and action awakening us to the possibility of living life more deeply with Christ.

One old practice is another fancy word, easily misunderstood: mortification. It sounds foreboding because we usually think of mortification as a deep humiliation, an extreme embarrasement. In such a moment, we might say, “I felt mortified [i.e., humiliated, embarrassed].” But the Lent mortification has nothing to do with embarrassement and humiliation. Instead, Lent mortification is a step taken to give up one thing in the hopes of getting something else. The “something else”? The possibility of being joined to Christ in every part of our lives.

Seen this way, we can now recognize that this is something we do all the time in other areas of our lives. We give up sedentary, indulgent lifestyles in order to have better cardiac health. We give up over-spending in order to have better financial health. We make these choices for the sake of being rescued from physical or financial unhealth.