If loving Google Chrome for Android is wrong, I don’t want to be right. I’d not mind being less geeky but not enough to give it up. After all, I just got it. That’s the wrong attitude for Lent though, isn’t it? I was invited to be more penitent for the next forty days. Be a priest, no less. Maybe the correct term is “priestess?” I don’t know any woman Episcopal priest who calls herself a priestess. Except Barbara Crafton maybe. It was not she who invited me to observe Lent.
Seems kind of weird though, doesn’t it? To be invited to repent? Usually the repentance happens after the thing to which you were invited. The party, the dinner, the sweat lodge. Whatever. My point is that nobody in their right mind signs up for repentance. Give me virgin birth or resurrection any day. Keep your introspection to yourself. (Get it? Introspection….to yourself!)
But that’s really the problem. I can spend all sorts of time in introspection and have no idea whether or not the read is correct. It takes another perspective, another person, to help discern if I am just whipping myself or if there is something that needs to be amended. That’s the difference between regret and repentance. I can walk around with my private regrets all my days, but a public repentance (albeit with one other person for whom I have already prepared concrete trainers) a public repentance carries the implicit willingness to change along with a public accountability. Prepare!