Written by Toby Amodeo for Lent 2025.
Celebrating Holy Week never comes at a convenient time.
Every Lent, I go in with big ambitions about how much time I’m going to spend with God. I envision this massive shift in my routine, setting aside everything else to reflect. But every year, I get to this point in the journey and have to deal with reality. I didn’t spend as much time with God as I expected myself to, I can’t change my routines on a dime, it’s the end of the semester and I can’t just drop all my responsibilities. And God wants to meet with me right in the middle of it anyway.
There is nothing wrong with setting big goals for my devotional life and trying to have extended time with God (obviously!). In seasons when I’ve had the space and ability to set my schedule, I’ve loved having extended time for reflection and journaling. But in most seasons, I am forced to accept that life doesn’t stop even if I don’t feel like I’m done processing something yet.
At the root of this is the fact that I want to be in full control of my time and what God does in my life. And that’s not how it works. My access to God is not limited by my ability or inability to set up the optimal conditions for an extended devotional time. God wants to be a part even of the areas that feel out of control.
Jesus, in the last week of his life on earth, must have felt the pressure increasing day by day. There are the crowds following him and cheering for him. There’s ever-intensifying encounters with the Pharisees. Then there are his disciples, who right up until the end, just don’t seem to ‘get’ what He’s trying to do. If there were ever a time that he just wanted to get away with God, this is it, but the hours keep passing by faster and faster.
Even in the garden of Gethsemane, there is more wrestling. He knows his mission, He can anticipate the pain, He is sweating drops of blood, He knows he must yield to the Father, but how? And yet, after carving out time late in the night to pray (and chide his sleepy disciples), He surrenders. Jesus yields to the will of the Father, knowing the cross to be the only way to accomplish what He came to do.
If Jesus could find a way to listen to and yield to God in the midst of the chaos, so must I. It’s not that God wants me to only ever be super busy and burdened by endless responsibilities. Yet He knows that life doesn’t simply stop when I’m trying to seek Him, and so He invites me to cry out in my distress and meets me there.
Because of Jesus’ surrender, I get to have open access to my Father. His presence isn’t just available to me – His Holy Spirit dwells within me, whether I am conscious of that or not. What I must learn is to live as if this is really true. I must learn to ‘pray without ceasing’ in any and all circumstances. I must present my real needs in prayer. I must accept that God is at work even in my discomfort.
Whether or not this Holy Week ends up being all you want it to be, may you be formed more and more into a disciple who invites God not only into the perfect devotional time, but especially into the real stresses of your life.
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