“Rend your hearts, not your garments, and return to the LORD, your God. … Perhaps he will again relent and leave behind him a blessing.”

            It’s a strange note on which to begin Lent, this “perhaps.” Perhaps God will forgive seems to imply, perhaps He won’t. Doesn’t this contradict what we were just told about Him? “For gracious and merciful is he, slow to anger, rich in kindness, and relenting in punishment.”

          Yet the Scriptures are full of this “perhaps” or “maybe.” Paul tells Christian teachers not to condemn their opponents because, “God may perhaps grant that they will repent and come to know the truth.” And David, commended for his fidelity to the Lord, “It may be that the Lord will look upon my affliction.”

          For us, “maybe” is a state of indecision. “Maybe” I will be faithful to my Lenten commitments. “Maybe” I will stop falling back into that habitual sin. “Maybe” I will succeed. I will try. But I can’t tell for sure.

          This is very different than the “maybe” of the prophets. “Perhaps [God] will again relent and leave behind him a blessing” is, in the mouth of the one who makes this cautious prayer, not a doubt of God’s goodness, but a faith in His almighty will, in His supreme providence: “Here am I, Lord, with my hopes and longings. I present to you this humble effort at penance, the little I can do in comparison with the immensity of the guilt of my sins. What you will do with it, I know not. But today, I choose to trust in You.”

          “Maybe God will have mercy” is the opening chapter in the story of grace. The “maybe” of uncertainty is a human conjecture, reflecting our tendency to project our own fallibility, our misattribution or deception, onto the world. This “maybe” is a prayer to the real maker, whose blueprint for the world is clothed in the vast and abyssal oceans of the inscrutable and unsearchable depths of God (Rom. 11:33).

          When I was a child, we sang every year on Ash Wednesday that we would rise again from ashes to create ourselves anew. Nothing could be farther from the truth. On this day, if any of the whole year, far from trusting in our own efforts, we recognize their insufficiency. But we present ourselves before the Lord of mercy, the words of David when he repented of his great sin echoing in our ears: “Have mercy on me, O God, according to thy great mercy. And according to the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my iniquity. … For behold I was conceived in iniquities; and in sins did my mother conceive me. … To my hearing thou shalt give joy and gladness: and the bones that have been humbled shall rejoice.”

          When we repent before God, standing “between the porch and the altar … weep[ing], uttering” who we are in fact and imploring forgiveness, it is God who creates anew in His mercy: I am ready to be made by you, we cry, in whatever new life you want to bring from my repentance, from my turning back to you. “Create a clean heart in me, O God … Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation, and strengthen me with a perfect spirit.”

          “Perhaps He will leave behind Him a blessing,” whichever blessing He wants. May your Lent, and your life, not be contained within your small imaginings, but through humble repentance, open to the vastness of His greater purpose.

The Rev. Royce V. Gregerson

Parish Church of Our Lady of Good Hope, Fort Wayne

Ash Wednesday, A.D. MMXXVI