The Twenty Year Lent
by Rebecca Ruybalid Stone
On the week of Halloween, a coworker proposed a discussion question in a team meeting, something we often do for fun. Her question was something like “What is something scary you’ve experienced related to church or your faith?”
Answers ranged from comical to serious. One teammate said a church she worked in had a terrifying painting of Jesus in a main hallway. Everyone called the image “scary Jesus,” and it ended up being used to give directions like “take a right at the scary Jesus.” Others shared things like how fear had been drilled into them about the rapture. Relatable.
When it was my turn, I told of how stressed out I would get for our church’s monthly communion service when I was a child.
Because I had been told God could or would punish me for unconfessed sin or even strike me dead Ananias-and-Sapphira style, I would start thinking of all my sins while lying in bed the Saturday night before. I wanted to be sure I got a head start so I could remember them all. I barely slept and went to church with a terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach, the sound of a dirge playing in my head as we drove down Uintah Street.
PC @ Rebecca Ruybalid Stone - My childhood church. June 2024
And it wasn’t as much the sins I was going to confess that worried me, it was anything I might be forgetting about that I needed to confess. What if there is more?
Speaking of more, there was more to my communion fears too.
Before we even got to the confession part, we had to sit through a KJV reading of Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 11. The section that really got me was “For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord’s body.”
Damnation to myself. My stomach tightened.
By the time we were ready to consume the 1” X 1” mini-pillow-looking “bread” my eight-year-old stomach was doing giant flipflops. I clenched my eyes shut, said one last prayer of “Lord, please save me from any sins I forgot,” and tossed the cracker in my mouth.
Crunch.
The grape juice went down easier because I figured if God was going to strike me dead that day, He probably would have done it when I put His Son’s body in my mouth.
Crisis averted. The 30-day countdown to the next communion service was on.
Tiny tightening.
I’m going to tell you something I’ve never shared publicly: I wanted to be a cheerleader.
So much.
While my parents probably would have cheered me on in this endeavor if I had begged hard enough, being on a squad would have meant dancing to music with a beat. Well, that just wasn’t allowed in our expression of faith. Add in those tiny skirts? Yeah. No. Was never going to happen.
I played volleyball instead. I’ll never forget the time my youth pastor came to one of my volleyball games and was offended by us warming up to “Shine” by the Newsboys. When I asked him after the game what he thought of how we played (we won!), all he could talk about was how horrifying he thought the music was before it even got started.
I remember my face falling. I remember trying to justify and explain. I remember my stomach tightening as I hunched over a bit in shame.
Cheerleading was out of the question, but I had found something I genuinely enjoyed in volleyball. Was it also wrong? Tainted? A sin to move my body in healthy ways to the words “Let it shine before all men, let ‘em see good works and then let ‘em glorify the Lord”?
Would I need to confess this on the next first Sunday of the month?
Probably.
Last month I was reading Becoming the Pastor’s Wife by Beth Allison Barr, a medieval history professor at Baylor. Much of this book is a journey through history of how the ordination of women was taken away little by little in order to feed those who desired power in the church—usually men, but other women have joined into the oppression as well. The second half of the book is how the denial of the calling of women to leadership has played out in the Southern Baptist Church, especially in the last 50 years.
I was reading parts of the book to my husband, Jeff. At one point, he quipped, “You were almost a Southern Baptist pastor’s wife!” It’s true. When we were engaged, we served in a small SBC church in Nebraska.
Jeff ended up resigning because the head pastor, Brother Stan, was stealing money and the board refused to fire him, even with proof. The man was also stalking parishioners in order to get dirt on them and intimidate them. Two years after we left, B.S. shredded all of the hard copies of financial documents and threw the church computers out the window. The board finally fired him.
As Jeff and I were thinking back about this experience, I told him how one night at our evening VBS, I somehow made Brother Stan angry. I think he told me to do something, and I said, “No.” I started to walk away. He bellowed my name from the front of the church as the people wentdead silent.
“Rebecca Ruybalid. You come back here RIGHT NOW.”
I didn’t. I kept walking. I balled my hand into a fist in case he came at me. But I kept walking. All the way out the door.
Jeff blinked at me as I finished telling him the story. “Wait. Whaaaat?? Where was I?” I told him that was the night I took him to the ER for tonsilitis. I had walked out of the church and straight over to the parsonage to check on him. He had been sick on the floor for hourswhile I helped with VBS. I had nearly forgotten about what happened with Brother Stan until reading Barr’s book.
The Sunday morning after I recounted the Brother Stan story to Jeff, I found myself sitting in our fellowship hall with a bunch of men in our church. They are from my old small group and my new one. We were cracking jokes and talking books and theology.
Something came over me. I found myself slouching more and more the deeper we got into conversation.
And there was no reason for it. I began to sit up straight. But I was super distracted by my body’s reaction in the presence of these men who were treating me with nothing but respect and equality.
If you don’t already know, it’s Lent.
Lent is the time in the church calendar when we focus on our mortality and sin and observe 40 days of repentance and confession, prayer and fasting. It begins on Ash Wednesday with an imposition of ashes on our foreheads, a sign of our mortality. It is sobering.
When I became Anglican in 2005, I had no idea what Lent was. I had never even heard the word.
But this new-to-me expression of faith had already seemed richer and fuller than my fundamentalist upbringing, so I persisted. Or at least tried.
Over the years, I have experienced a richness to this season. One year I gave up cheese as a discipline. I’m not much of a sweets or dessert person so this worked for me. Most years I’ve decided to take on a new practice instead or to read a book that goes with the season.
One thing that remains the same for me during Lent is how I have to fight extra feelings of shame and being a failure. It never goes away. Some of our liturgy wording includes familiar terms like “unworthily.” Confession and talk of sin become front and center as we move them to the top of the service.
In the Anglican church, we kneel during confession. Confession is good. Turning from old ways is good.
“Correction is mercy. Self-awareness is mercy,” writes Liz Charlotte Grant in her book, Knock at the Sky.
But do you know the old ways I need to turn from? It’s not just about the sins I may have committed, or even the ones I may have forgotten about as I come to confession and Communion. It’s also the sins that were done to me.
It’s the fact that I lived a twenty-year-long Lent on the front end of my life. And the fact that I have spent another twenty years of Lents being reminded of the ways I was made to feel small, worthless, and wrong just by my existence.
I had joy stolen from me time and time again. I had fear instilled in sincere little ol’ me in my formative years. If realizing that fact isn’t sobering, I don’t know what is.
When I kneel to confess on the front of each service for the remainder of this Lent, I also plan to sit up straight during the absolution and to rise up with confidence as I come to the table later in the service.
I will not continue to live in Lent, even when it is Lent. I was made for more than this. I was made to be free from sin, not beat myself up about it for the rest of my natural life.
Like the night I walked out of that brick church in Nebraska, I will say, “No.” I will keep walking. I will keep moving with my head held high. This is my spiritual practice.
Perhaps in time there will be less tightening in my stomach, though I am not opposed to a tightened fist when evil bellows at me and tries to pull me back into old ways.
Have I experienced scary things related to church and my faith? Many times. Lent was a lifestyle, due to my high control religion. But that doesn’t have to be my future. It doesn’t have to be my next twenty years.
The body of Christ, broken for *me*. The blood of Christ, the cup of salvation, for *me*. So I can shine instead of live in shame.
Rebecca Ruybalid Stone is passionate about bringing the church closer to Jesus and creating ways for everyone to thrive. For more than 20 years, she has done this by developing curriculum and books that have influenced the spiritual formation of many children, families, and church leaders. Rebecca grew up in Colorado Springs, CO, and loves the life she has built there with her husband and their four children. She is the author of Discipleship for Kids: Helping Children Grow in Christ (NavPress).