Today is Ash Wednesday, the day on the church calendar that marks the beginning of our annual Lenten journey to Passion Week, Good Friday and Easter Sunday.
Lent is a time for self-reflection, but I also find it to be an important time for increased intentional Christ-reflection. During Lent, I often find myself going back to the Gospels and this year I am doing the same thing. I will be reading Tim Keller’s new book King’s Cross, which takes us on a journey through the Gospel of Mark.
One of my favorite authors, pastors and theolgians is Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In a Lenten reflection, he writes:
“We understand Christ only if we commit ourselves to him in a stark ‘Either-Or.’ He did not go to the cross to ornament and embellish our life. If we wish to have him, then he demands the right to say something decisive about our entire life. We do not understand him if we arrange for him only a small compartment in our spiritual life. Rather, we understand our spiritual life only if we then orient it to him alone or give him a flat ‘No.’ However, there are persons who would not even bother to take Christ seriously in the demand he makes on us by his question: will you follow me wholeheartedly or not at all? Should there be something in Christ that claims my life entirely with the full seriousness that here God himself speaks and if the word of God once became present only in Christ, then Christ has not only relative but absolute, urgent significance for me?” — {No Greater Love: Lenten Meditations?}
To begin the Lenten journey, I will be attending an Ash Wednesday service here (my home church doesn’t have an Ash Wednesday service) and then going to a bible study with friends (where, coincidently, we are working through Mark’s Gospel).
BEN DUBOW 
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