If the beauty is shrinking and the soul-true tears have run dry, we should be wary. And we should pray for mercy. And we should begin to pay attention in new ways to how God is appearing among us.

"Wherever there is weeping," says Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, "there is God. The water of our tears invites him to create a new world within ourselves.

Like wax, our fear and posturing and attempts to control others melts. There's tears. Genuine tears. We crave more God-beauty in our lives. We ache to have this beauty let loose in the world.

There's abundance, laughter, joy. Everything opens up in God's world. There's dancing. Beautiful dancing.

And, when God is at work, we also experience a deep healing and holy upheaval in the human heart. Old anxieties and self-protections and resistance falter. We are "willing to yield" (James).

Whenever truth (and I understand "truth" to be another way of talking about God) arrives, then generative, raucous beauty breaks loose. In Genesis, the first thing we learn about God is how God creates. God makes more space, welcomes more creatures, expands what's possible, shatters boundaries.

And when you need to be humbled: the peg game.

The same moral ethic, the same understanding of humanity as bearers of God's image (I'm speaking to Christians on this point) moving us to defend Jews when they are slaughtered also moves us to defend Palestinians when they are slaughtered. This part is not complicated. This is basic Christianity.

Hamas carries blame here for how they use their own people as pawns, but Israel holds almost all the power. And the vulnerable are always the ones who pay the price.

It is more than possible to support Israel's existence, even their right to defend themselves, and also insist the slaughter of innocents must end. The starvation must end. The complete destruction of healthcare must stop (the last hospital standing in Gaza has basically been bombed into closure).

Ok, I'll revise by half: 25,000 innocents killed is unacceptable). Starving out a people is vile. Murdering 1200 in a rampage is butchery. Twenty-something hostages still being held (God, may they still be alive) is inhumane.

then we'll have far harder questions we want answered before a soldier pulls a trigger in our name or our government ships a bomb to an ally on our dollar.

But some threads are simple. Like these: 50,000 innocent killed in Gaza is unacceptable (are these numbers exaggerated?...

They loaded commercial jets with children, many of them infants, strapped into carriers into seats. Some were even tucked into cardboard boxes and loaded in the cargo area. The children were flown to the U.S., and also to Australia, West Germany, France, and Canada.

When things are haywire, we need more beauty, not less. I refuse to act as though the world is not a wonder.

Grateful it arrived at the right time

We can allow our wound, our grief, to be our prayer. We can bend our weary bodies. We can lean, even if only barely, toward the Mercy. For us. For everyone.

Lent is, after all, precisely for those who know they’re in trouble, for those who know they can’t get themselves out of their mess, for those who know they are going to die. But our lack and depletion provides us a unique capacity to carry the weight and the heaviness of this groaning world.

our dismissal of those virtues that would make the kind of world we’d want to give to our daughters and sons. We receive the ashes for ourselves and for the world.

If you have little to offer this Lent, little mojo for new spiritual practices or disciplines, then Lent might be especially for you...

our outrageous consumption, our failure to welcome and protect vulnerable children, our disdain for the immigrant, our killing, our inability to clearly name the truth, our failure as stewards of creation, our failure to nurture friendship and tenderness and self-sacrifice and bold courage...