Four days into Lent and the exercise is raising more questions than it's answering.  My inability to perform a 'perfect' lent leaves me with a sinking feeling of failure and comprimise and yet each of these choices was made for good reason.  Perhaps the oddest insight is that my Protestant upbringing, which makes so much of God's forgiveness, has left me with a persistent feeling of guilt.  The choices that I made, to have 2% milk in my coffee instead of cream (although a perfect lent would have refrained from even that amount of dairy fat), my slip up on Ash Wednesday when I ate a cupcake with buttercream icing, and the milk chocolates that I've been snacking on when watching TV with my family, have all left me with an awareness of my imperfection.

I was raised as a Baptist and taught regularly about God's perfection and righteousness, and the doctrine that every little sin is as culpable a failure and deserving of death as any other, which has shaped the way I see imperfection, error, and omission.  This is perhaps the single largest personality trait that I retain from my Christian heritage.  The slightest error or flaw is total failure because the only thing worth acheiving is total perfection.  God is perfect and our efforts are meaningless.  And so, Lent was always just another time for me to fail.  Something else that I would not acheive and God could mock me for.  His smug patronising 'love' that condescends to find me valuable in spite of my failures.  Caring nothing for my efforts, he demands either perfection or collapse into the forgiveness that only comes to those who can force themselves to believe in the unbelievable.  I cannot.  And so I work out my salvation, wrestling to acheive perfection because believing in Jesus is so offensive to me. 

The current trend is to say that Lent is an 'offering to God of your love and faithfulness'.  So here is my offering of Lent - I serve a God I cannot love.  Because this God only loves the mirror, I am forgiven only because of something he did, I am made utterly worthless and deserve eternal torture and death for the slightest flaw, and I am loved only insofar as he sees a reflection of himself in me.  And so,  I refuse your categories and creeds.  I deny your dogmas and doctrines.  I cannot live the perfection you require.  I offer my Lent to myself.  I offer my lent to a potter who loves a piece because of the speck of sand in the side of the clay - not in spite of it - and I offer my Lent to people who can forgive without demanding atonement.  For these are all more deserving of love and praise than the God of Christian teaching.