A Lenten Reflection by Ryan Dean
March 7, 2023
Sacrifice, Hard Choices, and Good Enough
Truth be told that when Rev. Eli’jah asked if I would contribute a Lenten reflection, I spent time researching what exactly is Lent. I didn’t trust that my annual attempts to quit drinking Diet Coke were an accurate understanding of this religious season. Although I grew up in the Moravian Protestant tradition, I have attended Unitarian Universalist churches for about 15 years before recently joining SPUCC, so it’s been awhile since I’ve observed the Lenten season.
In my research about what Lent means for most Christians, the word sacrifice kept surfacing. Certainly I’m aware of Christ’s sacrifice, but someone recently made an offhand comment that stuck with me until later in the day when I thought more on those words — “doing the hard thing and not taking the easy way”. Simple enough, nothing spectacular in these words. But, the person was offering their own definition of integrity. There’s often talk about how people have “sacrificed their integrity” such as what we refer to as “selling out” or “compromising our values”. I started thinking about it in another direction. I began wondering if to live a life with integrity does it necessarily require sacrifice or making hard choices.
As a parent of a young child, I’m often striving to be this ideal I have in my head of the kind of parent I want to be for my daughter. Parents absolutely make sacrifices for their children, priorities and resources shift from what life was like prior to caring for little ones. I would argue most parents also want to parent their children with integrity, demonstrating the values they hope to pass on to their children. This connection between integrity and sacrifice led me to wonder if there is in fact a paradox to this sacrifice that leads to living in the moment and experiencing more joy. For example, as a single parent by choice, I find myself caught in moments of indecision about how to prioritize my time. My 3-year-old daughter will frequently approach me after meal time to ask me to play with her, which I usually enjoy wholeheartedly (although I can only sip fake coffee out of tea cups for so long). At the same time I feel the pull to finish dishes and clean up the kitchen so I can be done with those tasks. Leaving the dirty dishes might not seem like much of a sacrifice and sometimes house chores can be turned into fun with a young child, but to this clean freak it can, at times, feel like a hard choice. In giving myself and my daughter the gift of being present, choices need to be made and priorities set which then express the values I want to impart.
Before adopting my daughter, I was an enthusiastic, self-proclaimed minimalist and in pursuit of simple, frugal living. Basically, I had found a movement that was essentially providing new labels to describe how Christ would want us to live our lives. Not long after this lifestyle change, I became a father. And, wow, babies need a lot of stuff! And then come all the toys and books you feel compelled to provide or you risk jeopardizing their development (or so others would have you believe). Slowly, but surely, the pull of simplifying my life and our things returned. I want to place value on experiences and connection over material things. At times, I feel like I’m making hard choices and sacrifices when I fall into the trap of comparing my parenting decisions with other families, yet I know in my heart as a parent that what I can best provide for her doesn’t come from a store. I don’t know that I ever answered my question about whether integrity requires sacrifice or making hard choices. I think maybe I’m learning to adjust my perspective about which choices are, in fact, the hard ones. Maybe setting aside household chores and not buying toys are not so hard after all.
While on the one hand Lent is a time for grief and solemnity with Christ’s death, it is also a time for renewal and transformation with Christ’s resurrection. Upon my reflection about Lent and what this time means to me, I’ve decided it will be a season of fresh starts and do-overs, a time to reconsider previous choices, and whether to keep doing what I’ve always done or try something new. This is most certainly how I parent. While I strive for that ideal knowing I’m not going to quite reach it, I also go to bed knowing that tomorrow is a new day and I’ll get another shot. And, in the end, it just needs to be good enough. I hope being a good enough Christian who is full of wonder, promise, and failings will be okay, too.