Know any good folk-dance tunes about the church year? Well, here’s one, a little Christmas ditty that made its way from the old country to my grandparents’ and parents’ houses; it goes like this:

“Now it is Christmas again, now it is Christmas again, and Christmas lasts until it’s Easter.

No, that isn’t true, no, that isn’t true, because in between comes Lent!”

Well, OK, so maybe it loses something in translation, and it also leaves out Epiphany. But, not unlike many a folk song, “Nu är det jul igen” contains a point that’s worth making, even though we’ve heard it before: We need some time for reflection in between the festivals that celebrate Christ’s birth and resurrection.

It’s not clear exactly when Christians began treating the 40 days before Easter (not including Sundays) as a time of fasting, penitence, and introspection, since it’s not mentioned in the Bible. The idea of reliving the events of Holy Week–the triumphal entry, the Last Supper, the Crucifixion itself –would have seemed obvious to early Christians, I am sure.

Still, the season grew to be so symbolically important over the first millennium that, even as the Protestant church rejected many Catholic practices during the Reformation, Martin Luther recommended that Lent “be retained, not to force anyone to fast, but to preserve the Passion history and the Gospels appointed for that season.”

And so the worldwide church focuses on just what Jesus did for us–in a sense, is going to do for us–on the cross on Good Friday. Whether individual Christians “give something up for Lent” or, just as interestingly, add something (extra prayer and meditation, for instance), these nearly seven weeks in between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday are an invitation to do something really different with our lives. (Why, I even read last month about a church in Minneapolis that is giving up committee meetings!)

I don’t have to tell you we’re in our own “in-between” period here at Libertyville Covenant Church: the interim period between Dave Johnson’s pastorate and that of whoever comes next. It clearly has been an opportunity for many of us to do different sorts of things than we have undertaken over the previous nine years, or to do the same old things differently.

It also has been a challenging time, a period of asking some questions and questioning some answers. While we know God has plans for us and our next pastors, we wish we knew both the plans and the pastors in advance. But just when I was starting to feel stuck in between, I looked at some numbers and had . . . an epiphany. So far this year, our Sunday morning attendance has exceeded that of the same Sundays in both 2001 and 2000 fully half the time. Our membership is back to 299. Our visitor count is remarkably high. Our giving is stable.

In short, even as we move resolutely through Lent and look toward Easter, our church is moving firmly ahead and looking toward a promising future.