Losership and Lent

Today is Ash Wednesday. It is the day in the church year when we start the season of Lent, our 40-day journey (not including Sundays) toward the celebration of Christ’s resurrection on Easter Sunday. Historically, Lent has been a time in which disciples of Jesus sharpen our focus on Jesus’ own journey to Jerusalem and what would happen to him there. “The Son of Man must undergo great suffering,” he told his disciples, “and be rejected by the elders, chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised” (Luke 9:22).

But Jesus went on to connect his journey to the cross with ours as his disciples. “If any want to become my followers,” he said, “let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it” (Luke 9:23-24). In other words, he lost his life for our sake; we can lose our lives for his sake. But that’s a hard saying of Jesus. What can it mean for us in our lives of discipleship?

A friend and a colleague of mine recently wrote a book in which he unpacks this saying of Jesus. Bill Shiell has been a pastor, seminary president, and fundraiser. He’s spent the past seven years as a small-group leader for a group of boys at his church who are now graduating from high school, and this book is meant as a graduation gift for them. His book is called Losership: The Door to a Joyful Life.

He notes that so much of the focus in society and even in the church is on success, winning, and leadership. But Jesus calls us here to “losership.” This is actually good news, because loss is a part of life. Sooner or later, something happens in our life that disrupts our carefully crafted paths of upward mobility. Some misfortune befalls us, or some misstep catches up to us, and our life takes a different direction from what we had planned. Jesus doesn’t consider these losses to be failures. Instead, our losses can be opportunities for us to learn more about what discipleship in the way of Jesus is about.

Suffering and loss can make us more empathetic to the struggles of others, for example. It can bring others into what he calls our “loser’s circle,” reminding us that we are not alone in our losses. And it can make us more attentive to the presence of the crucified and risen Christ with us.



So this Lent, instead of, or in addition to, thinking about what you might be giving up or taking on this season, I invite you to reflect on a loss that you have experienced in your life. What emotions did you feel in that loss? Who was present to you in that season of loss? How was Jesus present with you in that loss? What have you learned about yourself through that loss? How has your loss helped you be present to others in their loss? How have you risen transformed in some way from that loss?