Welcome to the third week of Lent. As we find ourselves at the beginning of a conversation today, let’s just begin with where we are in this third week of Lent. For some of us, we started Lent with a bang! We came up with great expectations, hopes, and desires. And maybe your life has just gotten away; maybe you started off, but maybe for a variety of reasons you haven’t maintained that momentum. If that’s where you are in this third week of Lent, that’s okay. How about we just recommit today? We’ll start all over again together.
For some of us, maybe you have been diligent about your spiritual exercises, but it’s the comparisons that are influencing you now. And as we pause just for a second in conversation, let’s talk about those comparisons. Right, it’s easy for us to either compare this Lent to other Lents that we’ve experienced in the past. Or perhaps we compare what we are experiencing in our life this Lent to what we think other people are experiencing in their life. Right, we compare ourselves to other people, and that’s never a fair experience for us. Or perhaps you just happen to have a great Lent. And if that’s where you are, then praise God! But wherever you are on the journey, what we all share in common is our desire for more. And if we pay attention to our hearts, listening, we will discover that we all want more.
I remember some time in my life it was after college and before seminary. I was working in Washington, D.C., and I think it was just this insatiable search for more—what would make me happy? I would spend a lot of time in the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception there and just reflect upon my life. And I remember thinking that once I got a job—that job that I had—it would make me happy. Well, I got the job, and I wasn’t happy. I remember thinking to myself, well, once I started making money and I had the house that I wanted and the things that I could surround myself with, then that would make me happy. Well, I was blessed, and I had a lot of that, and none of that made me happy. And then I said to myself, well, maybe if I found the right woman and I could find someone to marry and share my life with, well then that would make me happy. And I found someone who I thought would fulfill that dream in my heart. And that did not work out, and that wasn’t going to be the way that God would make me happy. And I realized that there was no one person on this earth or any one thing on this earth that could fulfill every desire in my heart. I was made for a person, but a particular person—the person of Jesus Christ.
It was a person that made me a person, that designed me. And it’s that person—God—that I was made for. This third week of Lent, we also meet another person – the Samaritan woman at the well—who has the same story that I had. And the beauty of Jesus intentionally pursuing her… What we find in the story from the gospel in the third week of Lent is that Jesus knows exactly what He’s doing when He is pursuing the woman at the well. He knows exactly why He’s going there—because He wants to find someone who doesn’t want to be found. He knows exactly what’s gonna happen when He finds her. Right, He’s gonna find a sinner—someone who was at the well at noon for a reason. And it is exactly what He wants to do with her. He, right, He wants to liberate her and free her. And I love the part of the gospel when Jesus says, “I thirst.”
He longs to bring her freedom just like He longed to bring me freedom in my life. Jesus thirsts for us and He created us with a thirst in our hearts. We were made for more. We were made to long for more. That’s what I see in my life. That’s what we all see in the woman at the well and the story there. And if we pay attention enough to our hearts this Lent, we will discover that we were made for more and that we are thirsting for more. So my encouragement to you at this stage of Lent is to pay attention, to slow down and to let the Lord take you deep within your heart to ask yourself what are you really wanting in life?
What are you really searching for in life? Do you want more?
Saint Thomas the Apostle Catholic Church 