Chocolate

The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise. Psalm 51:17

In recent years I started giving up a certain thing for Lent. I didn’t use to, as I tended to see such actions as a semi-prideful, almost self-serving exercise in futility. I don’t know what has changed in me; maybe it’s just that I’m getting old.  So be it.

Every Lent over the past few years then I have given something up. I will again this year. 

Chocolate.

Oh, there is still the self-serving element to my sacrifice. Very much so. If I am diligent, I will shed about 5-10 excess pounds. Please don’t feel bad for those pounds; they will not be lost forever however, as they seem to routinely rally back into place by early summer.

The best part of this self-serving exercise is this.  I do, when the chocolate pangs hit, remember what Christ went through for me, the road to the cross, the brutal execution on the tree.  I think back on rather gory scenes from the movie “The Passion of the Christ,” and suddenly my pangs seem rather silly.  I also use those panging times to stop what I am doing, and pray – usually about the first thing or person that comes to mind.

I hope and pray that is actually why I give up chocolate each year.   It’s just that sometimes it still feels that what I am doing is rather hollow.  Psalm 51 has this great line in it that says “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.”

And…I don’t think David was writing about chocolate.  But he was addressing a much deeper yearning that believers and trusters in Jesus Christ feel somewhere deep in their souls.  We may not know always how to address those yearnings, but they are there. Somewhere in my past I heard this yearning described as “A God-shaped hole” that we all have.

And chocolate will never fill the hole.

As we move into Lent my prayer for us all is that that God shaped hole that we’ve been filling up with (fill in the blank), will be left open for the Holy Spirit to inhabit; a sacrifice that God will not despise.

May your Lenten observance draw you close and closer to the One that ultimately fills all our yearnings.