Joel 2:12-18, Psalm 51, 2 Corinthians 5:20-6:2, Matthew 6:1-6,16-18

“Even now, says the Lord, return to me with your whole heart, with fasting, and weeping, and mourning; Rend your hearts, not your garments, and return to the Lord, your God.” (Joel 2:12-18) This Ash Wednesday reading, which sets the stage for the entire drama of Lent, makes one grand assumption: at one time we were with the Lord. If the Lord is calling us to return, it is from Him that we must have gone out. This means that no matter how far we have “gone out,” we are still His beloved sons and daughters. As I prayed through this passage, I thought about the decades of my life spent “going out” from God and how I took on identities and worshipped idols that were not of Him.

 Man is made to worship and if he does not worship God, he will worship something else. I grew up in a non-religious home with its own unholy trinity: intelligence, achievement, and success. I believed that I could earn love through grades, accomplishment, and admiration. After graduating magna cum laude from law school, I launched full force into a world where I could achieve and earn the respect of my family and my peers. Pride was so much a part of me, I could not even distinguish it from myself. So, when God, through a series of life circumstances, called me to be a stay-at-home mom, I experienced nothing short of a painful death. 

 Growing up, I developed a not-so-veiled disdain for women who chose to stay at home. The stay-at-home moms I knew were thought of as self-indulgent, weak, lazy, unintelligent, and sometimes even ridiculous. Since my self-worth was so tied up in my unholy trinity, when I chose to stay at home, I didn’t even know who I was. My family’s response and the models of motherhood I had known didn’t help. When my girls were little, I was asked if my plan was to raise them “to be stay-at-home moms too.” I was told that it was a shame that I took someone’s place in law school. And when Mike and I announced that I was pregnant with our fourth child, we were met with judgmental sighs and eye rolls. 

 Despite the negative feedback from people I love, I started to notice a gradual transformation in my innermost self. The idols I once worshipped began slowly and painfully to crumble. In their place, God seemed to be planting new seeds of identity grounded in His love for me and fertilized with His word and sacraments. I became aware of my unhealthy attachment to admiration, success, and achievement, and my unholy worship of a certain kind of education and intelligence. Moreover, motherhood began to call forth virtues, gifts, and talents I never valued and didn’t even know God could allow me to possess. Patience, tenderness, and kindness started to replace striving, comparison, and achievement. I began to see that I didn’t need to “be somebody” to be loved. Through the unseen, often monotonous, day to day of stay-at-home life, I realized that motherhood is its own education whose diploma from God is becoming the truest and best version of ourselves. 

 Even though our oldest will be 20 this year, I realize my conversion is ongoing and God still has a lot of work to do. I still sometimes feel a twinge of envy when I see a smart-looking woman dressed in a navy suit and heels. When I learn of my law school classmates’ successful careers and achievements, I occasionally wonder what I could have gained if I had continued to worship my unholy trinity. I am often tempted to believe that if I weren’t so lazy, I could have had it all – both demanding career and motherhood. I can easily doubt the choices I made, revert to seeing my life through the lens of the unholy trinity, and thus judge myself a failure. But I am equipped now to know that this spiritually blind way of seeing is what God wants to heal when He calls us to “return to Him.” When He asks us to “rend our hearts,” it is a call to go deep within ourselves to the places of sin and hurt that prevent us from being who He truly calls us to be. In reality, “return to me” is a return to the truth of who we are in Him. This Lent, I invite you to examine what is in you that keeps you from the truth of who you are in Christ. 

Sarah Fellona and her husband Mike have been married for over 20 years. After living all over the world, they are blessed to be raising their four teenaged daughters here in Abilene. She holds an MA in Theology and is a Certified Spiritual Director.