Sacred Space

 

There is something sacred about the in-between. In the language of transition, liminality is the quiet pause between what was and what will be. It is the hush between breaths, the dusk before dawn, the quiet just before resurrection stirs.

 

Lent invites us into a spiritual wilderness—a place both barren and fertile, disorienting and formative. We follow Jesus into the desert, into hunger and silence, into forty days of surrender. We let go of attachments, distractions, and comforts, not just to practice deprivation, but to prepare room. To clear the clutter. To lay down what no longer serves.

 

Isaiah’s words echo across this space: “See, I am doing a new thing… do you not perceive it?” But how can we perceive the new when we are still grieving the old?

 

This is the ache—and the invitation—of the liminal. It asks us to slow down. To sit with the uncomfortable. To let go of the urge to fix, to rush, to return to what was. It’s a space of waiting, trusting, and becoming—where our false certainties unravel, and our deeper identity is shaped.

 

In Isaiah 43, God speaks to a people who have known exile. The old stories of deliverance no longer carry them. The past cannot sustain what the future requires. So God calls them forward—not back to Egypt, not even back to their former triumphs—but into a future yet unseen.

 

“I am making a way in the wilderness,” God says, “and streams in the wasteland.”

 

What a mystery—that the wilderness is where the way is made. That the wasteland holds water. In Lent, the wilderness becomes a place of new paths. The wasteland—a place of unexpected provision.

 

To dwell in this liminal space is to stay awake to the possibility that God is already at work, even when nothing feels certain. It is to believe that resurrection begins in hidden places: beneath the ashes, within the ache, amid the questions.

 

And it is to hope—not for things to go back to the way they were—but to become something altogether new.

 

So, this Lent, what “former things” might God be inviting you to release?

Where do you sense you are in-between—and how might that space be holy?

Can you trust that a new thing is already springing up, even if you don’t yet perceive it?

 

Be still. Be present. Behold.