By Sarah Dahl, Children’s Ministry Co-Director - Sutter Campus

Lent sneaks up on me every year. It’s an odd time, for a parent: just as we’re settling into the routine of a new year, a new semester at school, here comes Ash Wednesday and its disruptive insistence that we are more like dead fires, like scattered dust, than anything else. And then there’s the annual indignity of seeing my children marked with ash crosses, and hearing another adult tell them that one day they will die. I’ve been a mother for nine years now, and I am still navigating this season unsteadily.

Books help. I don’t have the language to explain to my children the richness of this season. Honestly, I am still mining it myself, and suspect I will be for the rest of the Lents I am granted. Repentance, suffering, self-emptying, temptation, redemption, atonement: a person could spend years inside just one of those words. An unexpected gift of walking through Lent with children has been that I get to put those words aside for awhile, and go back to the stories that birthed them. Reading aloud - picture books, story Bibles, novels, and parables - has been the one consistent Lenten practice my children and I have kept.

My children love stories. And Jesus loved to tell them. It’s an odd kind of relief to put aside my adult anxiety about making Lent spiritually significant, or trying to understand God’s work in my life, and just take in the stories. In the Lent & Easter book crate under my bed are stories about Christians past, accounts of the donkey who carried Jesus, and collections of parables re-told. Sometime during Lent, I pull out Tomie de Paola’s Miracles of Jesus; it jostles on the shelf with Sylvester and the Magic Pebble. Every year, I finally put away the winter picture books and tuck I Heard Good News Today, Brian Wildsmith’s Exodus, and a collection of poems about Holy Week and Easter into the children’s book case.

This year, we are reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe to our five-year-old for the first time. There is nothing like watching a kindergartner cowering behind his hands as the White Witch raises the knife to remind me of the awe and sorrow that waits on Good Friday. And while I grew up believing that Jesus died for my sins, I only first glimpsed the glory of his resurrection sitting in a darkened church at my first Easter Vigil service, listening to the priest read aloud the story of Ezekiel and the dry bones.

I can shield my children from much, but I cannot shield them from the truth that Lent is about. There is sin and death in our world, and in us. Only God can do something about it. God has done something about it. So every year, we go back to the stories. They show us the splintering and the renewal. They show us who God is, and what to hope for. And I am grateful for them.