A Look at forty days

In my own words, Lent is about sacrifice, devotion, perspective, and reflection. Instead of giving up something, most years I try to do something new (or add in something regularly such as reading a daily devotion conveniently provided by the church's Lenten devotional booklet). 

Most of the time I don't give this choice much thought until Ash Wednesday. Then I sit there going, "hm what did I think of last year that I should do this year?" Because inevitably, I think of something great on Easter Sunday.

This year, I saw a post on Greg's Instagram of Lent 2015 Photo-A-Day. Each day has it's own word assigned to it. Each day, anyone can post a picture that represents that word on Instagram. It will be great fun to see what Greg posts, because I find his artistry to be magnificent. 

I saw something on my way to work this morning that I want to write about, because I couldn't take a picture of it. I'm going to try to blog about each word, every day during Lent (minus yesterday). That will be a challenge for me, and a sacrifice, so I'm willing to take it on.

This morning the sun is shining, the sky is a pale blue. Lake effect snow is to the west of us, but we sit here in this tiny sliver of light. As I head east to work, into the beautiful sun, I spot something. Dropping out of nowhere is a rainbow. I am wearing my sunglasses, so it wasn't too faint. It stretched out of a pale-barely-there cloud and fell toward the earth. I looked at it without my sunglasses and could barely make it out. I put my sunglasses back on and enjoyed the beauty of this small reflection. 

I wonder, how many other people saw this glorious wonder? How many people were too busy to notice? 

Isn't it strange that in order to see it I had to put on my sunglasses? How many times do we talk about what we see through "rose-colored glasses", which I have always taken to mean what are we seeing because someone else is telling us how to see. But maybe I've misunderstood that phrase. Maybe it really means to put on glasses to see clearly the things around us. With glasses, one who has poor vision is able to see clearly. 

Whoa, deep right?

Then I looked at today's word.

It's look.

Oh  my, well doesn't that fit? From that, and my lack of ability to take a picture of the rainbow that I could see, I decided my sacrifice this Lent is to write about the words. Not that I'm better with words than I am photos. 

I hope you'll join me on this journey. Be sure to look around and see what is right in front of you.