Prayer Tip--The Last Judgement

Someone shared a video recently—kids asking, “What if you knew the last time you _____ would be the last time?” The last time you rode bikes around the neighborhood. The last time your mom took you back-to-school shopping.

I was not prepared for the impact of that question.

Last times don’t announce themselves. You just move through them, on to the next thing, and one day you’re doing this math in your head, tallying up all the moments you blew right past without noticing. And somewhere between the nostalgia reel and your third cup of coffee, you find yourself wondering if you were more alive back then than you are right now. I do this more than I’d like to admit.

And then Lent shows up, which is not, it turns out, interested in letting you off the hook. Lent is ruthless that way. It insists on slowing you down, making you pay attention, walking you right into the middle of the story, whether you feel ready or not. No skipping ahead. No bypassing the hard parts. Just… presence. Which sounds lovely until you actually have to do it.

And then it walks you straight toward Holy Week. I keep thinking about Jesus in those final days. The one with a body and people he loved, and a week he could see coming that nobody around him fully understood yet. Did he feel any of what I feel when I think about last times? Did he long for one more ordinary evening? One more walk? Did some part of him grieve the life that was ending even while he was moving toward the thing he came to do?

I honestly don’t know. The gospels show us someone urgent and purposeful in that final week. But he was also a person. And I can’t stop wondering what it cost him to be both of those things at the same time. Not the pageantry of Palm Sunday or even the darkness of Good Friday (though Good Friday absolutely will shatter me–it does every year). It’s the middle days. The quiet Wednesday. A man still fully in it, still human, carrying more weight than anyone around him could see.

If Jesus knows what it is to move through last times with more weight than the moment lets you say out loud, then maybe he knows something about where a lot of us are right now. Maybe the life that feels small and ordinary and not quite what you pictured isn’t a sign that you missed it. Maybe it’s just… Wednesday. And Jesus, it turns out, was very familiar with Wednesday.

Lent hurts because love that big has a way of meeting you exactly where you are. Not where you thought you’d be by now. Not the more-put-together version of you that was definitely going to show up this year. Right here. Which is, honestly, the most terrifying and comforting thing I know.

You don’t have to have it together to walk through Holy Week. You just have to show up.

Which, it turns out, is something Jesus knows a little something about.