It's Tempting

A Reflection for the First Sunday of Lent

photo by Priscilla Du Preez ca on Unsplash

It’s Tempting

To want to be more

guaranteed of safety

the smartest one in the room

the author of my own destiny

of destiny itself

It is so tempting, but not ours to have

Instead, we have choice

choices to make

paths to follow or not

and a model, a guide, to follow

The garden was beautiful. Everything provided, everything good — and still, the serpent found a foothold in the one thing that was withheld. You will be like God. It is the oldest temptation in the world, and it has never really left us.

We want to be guaranteed. We want to be certain. We want to stand at the center of our own story and know that nothing can touch us — not loss, not failure, not the wilderness. We want to be the authors of our own destiny, and if we are honest, of destiny itself.

But Lent begins with an honest word: that is not ours to have.

What we have instead is something more humble, and in the end, more true. We have a choice. The Psalmist knows this — the long silence of a hidden heart, and then the release of confession, of turning back toward the One who shelters. Paul knows it too: the place where one man's grasping unraveled everything, met by another man's grace that runs deeper still.

And Jesus, in the wilderness, hungry and tested, shows us what faithfulness looks like when the temptation is at its most acute. Not control. Not certainty. Only this: the Lord your God alone.

Lent is forty days of that same wilderness — not to punish us, but to strip away the illusion that we were ever the ones in charge. We are not without guidance. We are not without grace. We have a model, a guide, to follow.

That is enough. That is, in fact, everything.

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The scriptures for this Sunday: Genesis 2:15–17; 3:1–7 | Psalm 32 | Romans 5:12–19 | Matthew 4:1–11