A Reflection for the Monday of the Fourth Week of Lent

Today’s reading ends with these lines: “They shall live in the houses they build, and eat the fruit of the vineyards they plant.” This, after the Lord promises to create a new heaven and earth, where people will live till fulfillment. At first I read this with a simple sense of peace, and that was enough, but when I think about the ending, I realized how rich these particular words of God are. We will live in the houses we build, and we will eat the fruit of the vineyards we plant. It seems obvious, doesn’t it—of course we will live in our own houses, and of course we will eat our own food. But contained within these lines is a more subtle fruit: we will benefit from our own actions, and our labors will, in some way, pay off.

I’m thinking about this in the context of my Lenten promise. Usually I would give up sweets, but I realized that Lent should not, in fact, be anything “usual.” So instead, I made a positive promise: I pledged to write 1,000 words per day, for forty days. So far I’ve stuck to it, but as with every human labor, what I put into it is what I get out of it. If I’m tired and I wait until 11:30 to write, then the words come clunky onto the page, and I close my computer with no sense of self-betterment, and no sense that I am closer to God. But on days when I center myself before writing, what I create is far better, and I can feel God behind me, reading over my shoulder.

I don’t want the house that I build to crumble, and I don’t want the fruit that I eat to be sour. Simply put, I don’t want my labors to be disappointing, and at the end of the day, I want to look at what I’ve built, and I want to be sure that it’s something worth it. Though today’s readings come from Isaiah, we read in Genesis that God considered every object he made, and he saw that they were good. And on this Monday of the fourth week of Lent, I will endeavor to ensure that everything that I create, though on a much smaller scale, is also good.