The first year I tried to “do Lent” properly, I gave up chocolate, coffee, and Instagram, and replaced them with a neat, impressive-sounding resolution: I would be more patient.
It lasted approximately four days.
By the evening of Ash Wednesday, I was already irritated with my roommate, scrolling mindlessly through my phone, and resentful that holiness apparently required me to become a different species. By the end of week one, I had failed so spectacularly that I stopped trying altogether and spent the rest of Lent carrying a quiet sense of spiritual shame: I wasn’t disciplined enough, prayerful enough, or serious enough about God. For years, that’s how I understood Lent — a spiritual obstacle course where the holiest people win by subtraction. Give up sweets. Give up complaining. Give up social media. Walk around mildly miserable and call it devotion.
READ: 5 Creative Ways to Bring Lent Practices to Life
But somewhere along the way, I started to notice something unsettling: none of this actually changed me in any deep way. I was still tired, still anxious, still carrying the same unspoken grief I’d started with. Still angry at injustice. Still unsure in my quieter moments whether God was really listening. I had given up chocolate, but I hadn’t told the truth.
I think many of us approach Lent like a spiritual diet. We mistake restriction for transformation, as if holiness can be measured in ounces of caffeine avoided or hours of screen time reduced. We treat our souls like a body we’re trying to sculpt: tighten here, cut there, discipline everything into place. But the Christian story has never actually been about perfection. It has always been about truth, often messy, uncomfortable, inconvenient truth. On Ash Wednesday, we don’t receive glitter or gold. We receive ashes. We are reminded that we are dust — fragile, finite, complicated, beautiful — and broken all at once. There is something profoundly honest about that ritual. It does not flatter us. It does not pretend we are fine when we are not. It marks us publicly with our mortality and invites us to look directly at it.
And yet, so often, we rush past that honesty into performance: What will I give up? How will I prove I’m taking this seriously? How will I look holy?
What if Lent wasn’t primarily about what we remove from our lives but about what we finally stop hiding?
READ: Please Don’t Give Up Social Media For Lent
Last year, instead of choosing something to give up, I tried something terrifying: I chose to tell the truth. I told the truth about my exhaustion, not the Instagram version of “busy,” but the quiet bone-deep tiredness that made prayer feel like an extra chore. I admitted that some days, I didn’t have soaring faith; I had small, stubborn hope and a lot of questions.
I told the truth about my anger, not just the polite kind, but the real kind. The anger I felt scrolling through stories of violence, displacement, and suffering that made me feel powerless. The anger I felt toward people I loved but couldn’t talk to honestly. The anger I felt toward myself for not being “better” by now.
At first, this felt almost irreverent, like I was doing Lent wrong by refusing to polish myself into a spiritually acceptable version. But the more I leaned into this honesty, the more I realized: This is precisely what this season has always made space for. Even fasting, when done well, is not about punishment. It is about clarity, stripping away distractions so we can see ourselves and God more clearly. But clarity is only useful if we are willing to look at what it reveals. Lent, then, is not a season of spiritual detox. It is a season of radical honesty.
LISTEN: How to Approach Lent as a Return to God with Father John Burns
What would it look like to practice Lent this way?
Maybe it means finally admitting the prayer you stopped praying because it hurt too much. Maybe it means naming a grief you’ve been avoiding, a relationship that didn’t turn out the way you hoped, or a dream that quietly died. Maybe it means acknowledging that you are tired of spiritual checklists and longing for something deeper, even if you’re not entirely sure what that is.
Pursuing the path of honesty did not make Lent easier. In some ways, it made it harder. But it also made it real.
There is a freedom in honesty. When I stopped pretending, I stopped carrying the weight of my own performance. When I told the truth, I created space not just for myself, but for grace. If Lent is about anything, I believe it is about returning to that reality.
When I stopped treating Lent as a spiritual performance and started treating it like a season of truth, I didn’t see a different God so much as I saw God more clearly, not as a distant judge, but as a patient presence already sitting with me in my exhaustion, anger, and doubt. Transformation, I realized, was never really about what I gave up, but about what I finally had the courage to say aloud.
