The Lint of our Lives

     This Season of Lent has me thinking about lint.  As in that cottony stuff you find when you stick your finger in your belly button.  As in the contents of those little dust-bunnies that blow around wooden and tiled floors.  As in the stuff between your toes after you take off your socks.
    What is all of that stuff?  Have you ever noticed that your belly button lint is the same color as whatever T-shirt you were wearing?  Maybe not, but I notice stuff like that.
    Lint is essentially tiny bits of our clothes that wears off and leaves behind a trace of its existence.  Our belly buttons and clothes simply collect those tiny nano-bits into a mass we can see. 
    Life is like that.  We leave tiny bits of ourselves everywhere we go.  We leave bits of our presence in our wake everywhere we walk.  A smile.  A little love.  A little hope. 
    But sometimes our life-lint is not so good.  A put down.  Gossip.  Greed.  Bitterness.  A shove.  A feeling of superiority and its corresponding impression of inferiority. 
    We can’t usually see our life-lint, but it’s there.  And every now and then, it gets collected in someone’s belly button, and we can see it clearly.
    Lent is about lint.  Lent is about taking time to be aware of the lint we are leaving behind - both good and bad.   “Through us, he brings knowledge of Christ. Everywhere we go, people breathe in the exquisite fragrance. Because of Christ, we give off a sweet scent” (2 Corinthians 2:14-15).  May God reform us this Lenten season so that our life-lint and life-fragrance may be more like Christ.