“Goodness and mercy pursue me.” God’s friendliness and kindness will run after me and chase me down, grab me, and hold me. The verb “follow” is a powerful active verb. We are being chased by God’s powerful love. We run from it. We try to escape. We fear that goodness, because then we are no longer in control. We do not trust such a generosity, and we thing our won best efforts are better than God’s mercy.

Lent is a time to quit running, to let ourselves be caught and embraced in love, like a sheep with safe pasture, like a traveler offered rich and unexpected food. Our life is not willed by God to be an endless anxiety.  It is rather, meant to be an embrace, but that entails being caught by God.

Lent is about noticing our blindness and seeing differently. In invite you, during this Lent, to see differently, maybe even for the first time. To see past your anxiety, your greed, your fear, your control. See yourself as the sheep of this Good Shepherd, as the traveler in God’s good valley, as the citizen at home in God’s good house. You will, when you see truly, be free and joyous and generous, unencumbered and grateful. Desire one thing: God’s presence. And you will be less driven by all those phony desires that matter not at all.

Pursue and catch us, Good Shepherd—embrace us in your love. Help us to trust you and desire you more than anything else, that we may know the joy and freedom of life in you. Amen.

A Way Other than Your Own, Walter Brueggeman, pages 32-33