In this week, as Lent's journey continues, we have opportunity to rethink our longing for control.  Lent is all about giving up.  We give up our time, we give up our pursuits, we give up our lives.  We give up security.  We recognize that we live in a world beyond our limits.  We acknowledge that if we try to control everything, we will inevitably end up creating a world of us and us alone, a world without any real point except poor little us.  We reduce ourselves to a collection of atoms spinning madly in a preordained nexus of space and time, avoiding everything but ourselves.

     Lent is one of God's way of telling us that though we are remarkable creatures, seemingly capable of directing the course of our lives, we will never be able to do entirely.  Lent reminds us that we are finite, that we have limits, that our marvelous attributes can only take us so far.  Sooner or later, we encounter a bump:  we realize that we are not so remarkable that we in ourselves can decide what we are and what existence means.  How can we?  We are only us.

     We in Lent are like the "Wanderer above the Sea of Fog," standing before the world, watching, planning, waiting, bereft, however, of ultimate measure over that which we see.

     And that's precisely God's point:  to live wisely, we must give up.  We must give up who we are now to find who we are, in truth, destined to be.

 After all, we will never have all the answers for the tragedy of the broken world.