By: Rev. Stephanie York Arnold
Feb. 10, 2026
Lent is just around the corner, quite literally, it begins next week. For several nights now, I have lain awake wondering what this approaching season might be inviting me to see, name, or experience anew.
As a youth, I loved Ash Wednesday services, though I’m not entirely sure why. One could argue I loved them the way a captive can learn to care for their captor. I grew up in the 1990s, at the height of purity culture, and even though I was United Methodist, the evangelical urgency to root out sin surrounded me. It felt familiar. Perhaps I loved Ash Wednesday because it was one of the few moments when we collectively acknowledged our imperfection. Our tendency toward sin and our need for something more holy than we could ever earn. Maybe. Probably. Eighteen-year-old Stephanie was unfortunately quite comfortable talking about sin…and pointing it out. (Oof!)
What I don’t remember practicing from my youth is Fat Tuesday. There was only Ash Wednesday.
That changed in adulthood and ministry. As a pastor, I began celebrating Fat Tuesday in my local congregation. We hired a jazz band and transformed the Fellowship Hall with gold, purple, and green. Beads were passed out, feather boas were donned, and people arrived in silly hats and costumes. We ate pancakes drenched in syrup, beignets, and bananas Foster. Families came. Older adults came. People drove for more than an hour just to be part of it. We played games, laughed loudly, and ended the night dancing together in a joyful “second line.” It was communal joy in its fullest expression.
That celebration became our marker that Lent had arrived. Ash Wednesday followed the next day, ushering us into somber worship. The Ash Wednesday services of my adulthood carried far more theological depth than those of my youth. We put away our “alleluias” and settled into stillness, honesty, and reflection.
This year, I find myself struck by the church’s wisdom in holding Fat Tuesday and Ash Wednesday side by side. It is only now, having stepped out of the pulpit, that I can more clearly see the beauty of their pairing.
For me, Fat Tuesday is not about excess, debauchery, or moral license, as it is sometimes portrayed. It is about feasting and experiencing the goodness of life in community. Jesus did plenty of this himself. Fat Tuesday is about celebrating and savoring the gift of life right in front of us. It is a radical insistence that even amid whatever life is throwing our way, joy remains possible…and worth practicing.
Ash Wednesday, by contrast, is not about shame or condemnation. It is not about flagellating ourselves for our failures. It is about honesty. Life is imperfect. I am imperfect. We are imperfect. And yet we are perfectly loved—just as we are—by the One who created us. Ash Wednesday also reminds us of a truth we often resist: life is temporary. We were dust once, and we will be dust again. It gently but firmly asks, What will you do with this precious, imperfect, temporary life you have been given?
Held together, these holy days reveal something essential about life itself. Life is both gloriously jubilant and achingly difficult. This is not punishment from on high, it is simply the pattern. There is birth and there is death. Ease and struggle. Elation and suffering. All of it wrapped up in what we call “life,” which one day will come to an end.
In a world that feels especially heavy right now, I realize how deeply I need both Fat Tuesday and Ash Wednesday this year. I need the joy of Fat Tuesday to remind me that life is a gift worth celebrating and to replenish my soul for the demanding work of helping bring Christ’s Kin-dom to earth as it is in heaven. I also need the honesty of Ash Wednesday. To take stock of the life I have been given and to notice where repentance is needed. Not repentance rooted in fear, as my younger self once knew, but repentance that reorients my life toward love—honoring the gift I’ve been given and giving it away so others, too, might experience abundant life.
I don’t know if I will give anything up for Lent this year. Instead, I may practice joy as an act of resistance—week by week—while also asking how that joy might be extended to others. Maybe this means calling my representatives daily to express, from my faith perspective, what I believe a life of abundance could mean for my neighbors near and far. Maybe it means I donate to charities that are empowering others. Maybe it means walking peacefully with others as we stand for hospitality to the stranger and peace for all nations. Maybe it means joining in worship with others to sing and package care bags for those who have lived through disaster. Maybe it means sharing a meal in my home with neighbors who don’t always view the world the same way I do.
If nothing else, this Lent will be about holding the paradoxes of life: the feast and the famine, love and hate, joy and sorrow, ease and struggle. I will savor the joy so that I might move more gracefully, more resiliently, and more prophetically through the difficulty.
York Arnold is the general secretary for the General Commission on the Status and Role of Women.