Dear Friends,

Last night as I drove home from our evening Ash Wednesday service, I was listening to an interview on NPR's “Well Woman” show featuring three black women who had achieved remarkable success as entrepreneurs, even as they recognized the challenges they have faced in achieving balanced self-care. Anxiety, burnout, insecurity…all those things were hidden behind the veneer of being a “resilient, powerful leader.” What touched me the most, and has remained with me, is the temptation that they, and we all face—to appear stronger, more capable, more invincible than humanly possible.

During the season of Lent, we tend to focus on self-denial, and try to eliminate whatever self-indulgences are getting in the way of our relationship with God and with one another. But I’m not sure that is where our focus always needs to be. What we may need to be focusing on is what it means to take better care of ourselves so that we don’t succumb to habits and appetites that diminish our souls and our relationships.

The 12-step movement suggests an acronym, HALT, to remind us to pay attention when we become Hungry, Angry, Lonely or Tired. Unheeded, these natural human conditions can make us vulnerable to temptation. As ridiculous as it sounds, many of us try not to notice our needs. To admit that I get hungry, angry, lonely, tired—and the list goes on—is to acknowledge my vulnerability and the reality that I’m always leaning on a power beyond myself. Not just leaning, but inexorably linked, totally dependent on re beyond my own. 

HALT gives us permission—in fact, orders us—to stop and notice who we really are, fragile and limited, and acknowledge our need for connection – to God and to others. In other words, we will not overcome temptation through placing greater restrictions on ourselves, a common Lenten mistake, but by following our deeper intuition to embrace the disciplines that will help us “let go and let God.”

Jesus is driven into full HALT mode when the Spirit leads him into the wilderness. He experiences every temptation of the human condition. Our raging thirst for power, prestige and honor, our ravishing hunger for material goods and lives of ease, our desire to go it alone yet never be alone. It seems significant that Jesus, who certainly was no loner, who was known for sounding the call, “Follow me,” makes this sojourn without human companionship. In the words of one writer, “all of us will face such times, when the crowded life must be left behind, when we must peer into the dark well of our own need, our lust for what we do not have, our weariness with what we do have, our temptation to do and be and possess far beyond our capacity, beyond God’s callings for us.”

During this season of Lent, I invite us all to “call a HALT” —to identify the ways we respond to our hunger, anger, loneliness, and tiredness and to consider whether they are giving life or taking it away. And then, let’s have the courage to lose our false ideas about ourselves and try to find God’s idea of our selves—the true selves that God made and loves, still.

In Christ,

Amelie+