immersion

The golden week at the cottage, on the shores of Lake Huron near Goderich, Ontario, is one we anticipate each day we are not there. It's a try-to-make-it annual event, but pregnancy, babies and other excursions creep in between times.

For nearly three decades our family has sojourned there, a tradition started by my grandparents...my English born and bred grandmother loved the water.

It's the water which draws me too. Occasionally bone-chilling even mid-summer. Sometimes stirred up by wind and storm, God's washing machine and we are the laundry.

Though the water memory which holds me fast is the sensation of water closing over my head as I dip beneath the surface, raising goosebumps at liquid shock. Then... the cooling of sun-warmed skin, the lifting of hair, the pulling through the water, exploring. It is the immersion which beckons and perhaps we never really forget the nine months spent in a fluid embrace.

Today, I realized it's immersion which my spirit is crying out for - another glimmer of light God sheds in the fog of the past few months. And I think it's why I turn jittery, anxious, edgy when I have too much going on in my head and in my surroundings. I want to sink into the moments, fully immerse myself in them and immersion is impossible when splashing from one puddle to another. I recently read about this sinking into time idea in One Thousand Gifts and it makes so. much. sense.

Which is why I want share about something I'll be doing for this season of Lent which begins February 22. I've been praying about this for several weeks, asking and re-asking God for confirmation. But I think He just wants me to take the plunge. So here goes. Deep breath.

From February 22nd through Easter I'm going to fast, with God's strength and mercy, from the computer. For 47 days I'm going to put it away, bury it somewhere in our house and immerse myself in life apart from the laptop. I need this fast on so many levels, but it seems rather daunting given how much our lives are bound up in technology...even simple things like communicating.

It will take some preparing between now and then and I wonder if those 47 days will seem like months or years. I wonder too if I will feel more apart of the world or separate from it. Questions which can only be answered on the other side.

I wonder if this is something God may be inviting you to do too, whether it is for the complete 47 days or only a portion. An invitation to immerse yourself. Give yourself fully to another area He may be calling you to. A baptism of Spirit to spirit. If you do take up this invitation, will you come back and let me know that we may pray for another to guard against temptation and to open ourselves to receive what God may have in store?

In the next week or so, I'll also share about something I'm working on for Lent, another way to immerse, prepare, receive the gift of Christ's dying on a cross for us.

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