Have you ever heard the lament about life being too shallow? That we rarely get past the surface level? We have acquaintances, but not deep friendships. We have jobs that get us a paycheck, but not callings that give us a purpose. We experience the routine of weekly (?) religious ritual, but not the practice of God's presence rooting our daily reality. In the midst of a ho-hum winter, if you are discovering that a shallow life leaves you searching for something more, something deeper, then I have just the thing: Lent.

This year, the entire month of March is in the season of Lent. Lent is the part of the Church year that leads us to the pivot point of history at the Cross and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. It calls us to what we traditionally call prayer, self-examination, penitence, and fasting. May I suggest that another way to talk about the same thing is to say that Lent invites us to go deeper in our relationship with God?

What Professor of Christian Theology, Richard J. Foster, wrote in 1978, still rings true: "Superficiality is the curse of our age.... The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or gifted people, but for deep people." (Celebration of Discipline, rev. ed., 1988, p. 1) People are yearning for authenticity, connectedness, recognition and probing of complexity, awareness of truth and beauty. Just last year, one of the top books of Leadership magazine, published by Christianity Today, was a book by Dr. Gordon MacDonald called Going Deep: Becoming a Person of Influence.