What Lent Hands Back to You

I didn’t grow up with Lent. It wasn’t part of the tradition I was raised in, and for a long time it felt like something that belonged to other people. It was a ritual I knew about but from a respectful distance.

But curiosity has a way of opening doors, and eventually I walked through this one. What I found on the other side was not the obligation or austerity I expected. What I found was an invitation.

Lent is forty days. Forty days of intentional attention. Most of us have heard it described or even experienced it as a season of giving something up, and that is one true way to enter it. But it is not the only way.

Sometimes what we most need is not to subtract but to restore. To add back something we had set aside that mattered. Perhaps return to a practice, a habit, a version of ourselves that somehow got left behind in the rush of living.

This year, what I restored was something in my journaling practice.

The Right Thing, the Wrong Way

I had kept a handwritten journal for years. There is something about putting pencil to paper, or pen if that’s your preference, that a screen simply cannot replicate. It’s something about the way a thought slows down to the speed of your hand, the way the page holds your words without judgment or algorithm.

But late last year, I migrated to an online journal. As I have gotten older, my handwriting seemed to get a bit shakier and even I had trouble reading it at times! Plus the online option tracked my word count. It told me how many days in a row I had written, how many words per session, whether I was maintaining a daily streak.

I kept journaling. I want to be clear about that. I did not abandon the practice. But I let myself become more drawn to the word count than to the words. The journal writing became a metric instead of a mirror.

The compelling result was that I was measuring my faithfulness instead of experiencing it.

Lent gave me the space to notice this. Not with shame, that is not what this season is for, but with the kind of clear-eyed honesty that comes when you intentionally slow down and ask yourself what is actually happening.

I had been doing the right thing the wrong way, and in the process I had lost its beauty.

So I went back to a notebook. A real one. I started writing by hand again, and what came back to me was not just a restored practice but a presence. My own presence, on the page, without a counter watching.

What Forty Days of Honest Seeing Does

Here is what I have come to believe about Lent, whether you observe it within a religious tradition or simply as a spiritual practice of your own: it is a structured invitation to pay attention.

Forty days of asking, with some consistency and some courage, what do I most need right now? Not what should I need. And definitely not what looks like faithfulness from the outside.

What is actually true for me, in this season, at this particular juncture of my life?

That question is not as easy to answer as it sounds. We are practiced at moving quickly past it. We fill our days, we meet our metrics, we check our boxes. We can spend a very long time doing the right things in the wrong spirit and never quite realize it because the output looks fine. Everything appears to be working. But something in us knows the difference between going through the motions and actually being present to what we are doing.

Lent interrupts that. It creates a container with a beginning, a middle, and an end in which we agree to pay a different kind of attention.

And what we find inside that container often surprises us.

The Season Doesn’t End with Lent

The Easter season does not end with Lent. It ends at the resurrection, at the proclamation that something that seemed finished is, in fact, not finished at all. That is not a coincidence. The season is designed to move through honest examination toward new life.

That means that what you carry within Lent is meant to be carried forward.

For me, that means I am coming out of this season of Lent with my handwritten journaling practice restored. A truer relationship with the practice that had always been one of my anchors is mine once again.

I did not solve anything dramatic. But now I know something important about how I drifted, and I have corrected my course. That is not a small thing.

Give Yourself Permission to Come Back

What does this look like for you? Maybe it is not journaling. Maybe it is the way you pray, or the way you rest, or the way you show up for the people you love.

Is there a version of something good in your life that has become about performance rather than presence?

The practice of Lent asks us to look at that honestly, not with condemnation but with curiosity. But you don’t have to wait for Lent to experience it.

Here at Yes I Can Living we are about giving ourselves permission to say yes to what matters to us and what we want for and from our lives. In so many cases, that permission involves coming back to something.

You are allowed to acknowledge that you drifted from the truer version of a practice or even of yourself and to simply return, without making it a bigger story than it needs to be.

You do not have to earn your way back. You can just go back.

That is, in some ways, the deepest thing this season’s Lent has taught me. Not that we are broken, but that we drift. Not that we have failed, but that we can return.

What Lent hands back to us—the insight, the restored practice, the clearer knowledge of what we actually need—that is ours to carry into every ordinary day that follows.

What will nurture the change you most need next?