I sat at my favorite hometown coffeeshop today, writing, grading, thinking. Lent has put me in a pensive state; I am aiming to attend to my daily life with intentionality and focus as a practice of the season. What kind of life am I living? Where is there sin in my life that needs to be rooted out, repented of, and turned away from? What is God pointing me toward? Away from? How can I say yes to him more fully? What does it mean to obey him today?

I was sitting near a window, soaking up the sunshine that is peeling the snow back from the soaked earth. This coffee shop shares a driveway with a Catholic church, and as I sat and wrote near the window, I saw a college student down that driveway, see the church, and quickly cross herself. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, I found myself thinking. I spent years in an Anglican church, and the movement that was so foreign to me as a child became a normal part of my weekly church experience in college. Forehead, chest, left shoulder, right shoulder.

The sign of the cross.

And I was reminded: this is the good news to be found in the middle of Lent. We are making our way to the cross. It was a simple reminder, but a central and necessary one, and it is how we can make it through the consideration of our own sin without losing hope. We walk through Lent because we are heading toward the Cross. The journey there will be difficult at times; the fact that Christ needed to bear the cross points to the reality of brokenness and sin in a wounded world. But he went. He went! He went to the cross willingly and full of love—for us, the broken and wounded. He took the shame and the pain that was rightfully ours to carry.

The sign of the cross is mercy to us. It is a mercy to me. In the long days of Lent, I am pausing to remember that we are the ones who live in the shadow of the cross.

And the cross is good news, indeed.

Sin. It’s not a fashionable word. In our culture, it isn’t often viewed as something that even exists. I remember, in my first graduate school program, having a conversation about truth—right and wrong, good and evil. It was a rhetoric course, and I think we were discussing the use of language and how it can—and can’t—point to reality and truth. Perhaps ironically, the conversation had taken a turn into ideological Never-Never Land—a place where students go because we like to hear ourselves talk, not necessarily because we have something to say. We were in the realm of ideas, floating in the clouds.

Eventually, we got to the crux of the issue, the real question burning underneath the layers of rhetoric and theory and dialogue: truth. Does truth exist?  Is it real? Is there actually good and evil, or just varying shades of gray along a continuum that humans can live within? Who are we to say what is good and what is evil?

I was, from what I knew, the only follower of Jesus in the room, and my heart was pounding. One of my classmates spoke up.

“I don’t think there really is right and wrong. I think that people have their own ways of living. They can choose what their particular rights and wrongs are.”

I knew that there were questions that could cut to the heart of the whole conversation.

I rose my hand.

The professor nodded.

“I disagree,” I said, my voice steadier than I felt. “Right and wrong do exist, and we all know it.” I took a breath. “Would anyone say that what a pedophile does is right?”

The room fell silent.

I had crossed the invisible line; the ideas that exist so nicely in the realm of thought and theory don’t always make sense in the messy world of people. I had named something so evil that no one in the room dared to disagree with me—at least not out loud.

I had crossed the invisible line by naming sin.

Here, in this first week of Lent, we must cross that line again. We must name, at the outset of the season that points us to Easter, the need for this season at all: sin.

Sin.

Jesus didn’t have to bear the cross for us because we were mostly ok with just a few problems. Jesus didn’t have to wear the crown of thorns because we had it mostly together. Jesus took the pain and the shame and the suffering of the cross and he bled his life out for us because of our sin.

We are all sinners.

We may not be sinners of the type I named in grad school. But comparison of sin does not make sin any less than what it is—falling short of God’s standard of complete holiness. I am a sinner. I don’t have it all together. I fall short of God’s perfection every day, every hour of my life. Jesus went to the cross because I—we—are fully incapable of meeting the standard of holiness that God requires. The Word is clear: “…all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God…” (Romans 3:23).

Today, I am considering the reality of my own sinfulness. There is hope on the other side of Lent, but a hope gained too soon takes the sting out of our real state. We have to come to terms with our own state. We are mortal. We will die. We are sinners.

The Gospel, as Frederick Buechner wrote, is bad news before it is good news.

But the Gospel is good news. Easter is coming.

Tell me–where in your life have you had to “cross the line” and tell the truth?