Lent: Blood Fountain

How can the earth have spun so quickly around the sun that Ash Wednesday is here again, like two daughters, grasping hands and turning in mind-blurring circles, collapsing with hard breath?  But after the breath returns and the heart rate slows, there is time to stare at the spinning ceiling and slowly get your bearings.  This is what I am doing: catching my breath and reflecting on Lent, allowing it to come into slow focus.  

The ground is white and frozen hard in Minnesota in February.  It takes a sun gathering up its strength to melt snow and thaw soil and crack ice.  The magic will happen by Easter.  The thaw will have begun.  It's happening.  Now.  In my heart.

During this thawing season of Lent, I intend to meditate on the words of hymns and think about the dear souls who wrote them.  As a songwriter, I am captivated by lyric and the minds that craft them.  Each of my own songs has a story behind its creation.  Perhaps I will reflect on a few of those, too.  This will be my small offering each day of this journey.  

There is a fountain filled with blood drawn from Immanuel's veins

And sinners, plunged beneath that flood, lose all their guilty stains.

-William Cowper, There is a Fountain

William Cowper, who grew up in the 1700s, was so acquainted with loss, the deaths of his mother and multiple siblings, and bullying at boarding school that he eventually threw away his Bible and attempted suicide.  It was in an asylum under the gentle care of Dr. Nathaniel Cotton, that William found regeneration in these words:

Whom God set forth as a propitiation by His BLOOD, through faith, to demonstrate His righteousness, because in His forbearance God had PASSED OVER 

the sins that were previously committed.  

Romans 3:25

[propitiation: appeasement of a deity]

Today, I think about the sins I've previously committed...the critical tongue, the selfishness, the withholding of love and grace, and all the excuses I made to justify them.  I get a sickening feeling as I look at it all square and call it what it is and accept that a lot of it genuinely hurt people around me.  

I dip my toe in this blood-fountain.  Forgive me, Lord.  I scoot closer.  Drop my body in.   For I have sinned.  Plunge down all the way.  Wash me.  Burst up through the surface, cleansed.  O, God, thank you.