EASTER WALK
The Five Steps of Repentance

Julie Gochenour

I’ve been restless all morning, unsettled and ill at ease within myself, pushing against something I poke and prod but refuse to name. Time for a walk. I head out the door and take the path through the woods.

In psychology, congruency is when our actions, speech, and other behaviors are consistent with our internal thoughts, feelings, and beliefs.

In Christianity, it’s when all those things—our true self—are in synch with God’s promises. Lent, I decide, is about our dishonesty and inconsistency.

Easter is congruency. It’s when we get to God’s promises.

“I’m good at Lent,” I tell God irritably. “Easter’s another story.”

In the woods it’s barely spring. Most leaves and buds, like my heart, are shut tight. It even looks like Lent, Easter light-years away. I come this way every day—through the woods, past the neighbors’ Christmas tree farm and cornfield, across the end of our hayfield and up the lane to the house. This morning the sameness allows me to examine my heart as I walk. By the time I reach the brush pile, honesty rises up in me. Clarity follows. I walk with both, resistance and irritability subsiding.

Just past the cornfield, I stop. The disconnect hits me. My entire walk has been prayer, but this is different. I suddenly see what I’m resisting. I test it, reaching for Jesus and Scripture. Yes. The discrepancy is obvious. Instead of faithfully correct, I’m dead wrong. Where Jesus turns left in my life, calling me to follow, I go right, cutting across fields and ditches to avoid what he asks and promises. The deception is plain. Unloving and self-serving, judging others and persuading myself I don’t, I go my way, not God’s. Then I tell both of us that just the opposite is true. Worse, I pretend to believe it. Now what?

Standing there, seeing myself as I am, I pray for forgiveness. And repentance. I need both. A crow flies across the unplowed field, cawing. I listen. What I really want is to turn around and come home. Not just turn and face God again, but run toward him and all he promises, shaking off incongruency and leaving it behind. But how? How do I move from remorse and repentance to transformation of heart, life, and actions? Given my resistance and deception, how can I possibly think I’ll let God change me?

The answer is the five steps of repentance. These steps are how we move from Lent to Easter, how we change from who we are to the person God calls us to be.

“Darn it,” I tell myself, looking at the empty field beside me, the gravel tracks below. “Now I’ve got to change. So much for trying to make Gary do what I want. So much for thinking I know what’s best. There goes my new kitchen too.”

“Come, little one,” Jesus says, and I reach for his hand.

Step 1: Repent of what you’ve done. I’m wrong, Lord. I’m angry and refuse to admit it. Despite my best intentions, I continue to deny my brokenness and put appearance before reality. I use others to meet my wants and needs. Beneath my veneer of niceness and religiosity is something else entirely.

Step 2: Repent of being God in your own life. I insist on my own way and do my best to get it. I put myself at the center. I rely on my skills, attitude, efforts, not your promises. I set the agenda, not you. Even in church and meeting, I jockey for status and position. I practice self-condemnation, usurping Jesus’ role as the judge of my life.

Step 3: Take both of these to the foot of the cross and leave them there. That’s hard, Lord. It’s hard to let go of my screw-ups and the camouflage they give me. It’s even harder to stop beating myself up and recognize I’m forgiven. The hardest of all is to accept grace and go from there. When I do, I’m free. When I don’t, I’m not. I go right back to the past. Nothing ever changes. You still love me, but it’s not where you want me to be.

Step 4: Ask God to give you a new vision. What do you want, Lord? I’m ready to find out. I’m ready to accept your vision, not mine. I’m ready to consider a new life—the way I must act, be, and believe in order to become the person you desire and created me to be.

Step 5: Go for it! So this is where Lent ends, Lord. This is where Easter begins, where I live out your Easter promises one concrete choice and decision at a time.

I pray. Then, slowly, the sound of traffic on the paved road a quarter mile away brings me back to my surroundings. I resume my walk, Jesus beside me. My world still looks more like winter than spring, but not for long.

—Julie Gochenour, member, Religious Society of Friends, is completing her M.A.R. She and husband Gary live on the family farm in Maurertown, Virginia