Welcome to Lent. Well, technically, Lent began last Wednesday, and traditionally, Sundays are considered “in Lent but not of Lent.” Maybe I should say instead, “Welcome to Daylight Savings Time.” I should also say, “Be careful out there.” I heard a Fox News story on the way into the office this morning about a study out of Michigan showing that heart attacks increase 24% the Monday after Daylight Savings Time. The researchers affirmed the change’s very real shock to the body’s internal clock and recommended taking it slowly, going to bed earlier, and not drinking too much caffeine. Unfortunately, I heard the story only after my morning routine of stopping for a large coffee at the Hartland McDonald’s.

We’ll see what happens.

But again, welcome to Lent. We’ve officially entered into an unmistakable time in the Church Year. It’s a 40-day pathway paved with penitent reflection leading to Easter. Many of Lent’s travelers make fasting or abstaining a part of their devotion. Fasting takes different forms. Abstaining does, too. Some will avoid certain things they enjoy, such as coffee or sweets. Others make a deliberate attempt to wrestle and pin a bad habit. Still, others up the ante on their Christian devotion, electing to read their Bible or pray more often. I appreciate the practice of all-around betterment. I’ve decided to do a little bit of everything. I won’t share the details. Just know that if you’re observing Lent in one or more of these ways, I’m in it with you, and I’m rooting for you. I hope you’re rooting for me, too.

One thing for sure is that I’ve never heard anyone say they wish they hadn’t observed Lent in these ways. You might know someone who has felt that way, but in all my years of Lenten fealty, I haven’t. That’s probably because the people who do it eventually realize something. Lent’s visceral preparatory nature has a way of juxtaposing the “before” self with the “after” self. Win or lose, a person who takes a deliberate look at Christ’s sacrifice for sin and then deliberately pits himself against an unseemly tendency is not the same person who emerges on the other side of the bout.

This is no surprise to me. Human beings have a consolidated sense of the before and after of moments—events, struggles, times in our lives—rather than the details of any particular day. We look back on these moments, and we see the before and after—who we were and how things changed. The weekend of Good Friday and Easter was a pivotal moment. That’s what Saint Paul meant when he said, “Besides this, you know the time, that the hour has come for you to wake from sleep” (Romans 13:11). For “time,” he uses the word καιρόν—the period of events or a moment among moments. Paul, the Apostle who was not ashamed of the Gospel of the crucified Savior (Romans 1:16-17, 1 Corinthians 1:23) and was determined to know nothing among anyone but Christ crucified (1 Corinthians 2:2), he implies in Romans 13:11 that the world is not what it once was before the death and resurrection of Jesus. He insists that believers have been awakened—that they are not who they were before their faith in the crucified and risen Savior.

For Christians, everything is different now following Good Friday and Easter. Lent takes us by the hand and walks us back to the moment’s precipice. It wants us to revisit and understand it more deeply. It wants us to never lose sight of it.

In a world of uncertainty, you know as well as I do how critical it is to keep our eyes fixed on Jesus (Hebrews 2:2). Every day brings new crises. Indeed, time’s pace is relentless. Chaucer said, “Time and tide wait for no man.”

But there was a moment in time that met with and beyond time itself. Lent seeks to remind us that because of that moment, we are not meant to be swept along with the tides of the world. Instead, we are fixed to Christ, the One who has already overcome the world, which includes the time that encapsulates it (John 16:33). We do this keeping in mind that Lent’s disciplines—the self-examination, the penitent recalibration, the consecrating view—these are not acts of disengagement from time, but of proper reorientation. They turn our gaze from the fleeting anxieties of the age to the eternal victory of the cross.

No matter how chaotic the present moment may be, the defining moment has already come. As Christians, we are awake to this, and now, the καιρόν—the moment of all moments—is the lens through which we view all things. It shows us the before and after. Before, we were lost. But then Golgotha and the empty tomb. Now, we’re in the after of something completely different—something better. We’re in the after of faith in the One who endured the moment of moments. We’re in the after of Christ’s glorious and eternal victory.