The season of Lent is a time for us to give up what we are, what we have been, in order to become what we are called to be.
Scholar of Hebrew Scripture/theologian Walter Brueggemann put it best, I believe, when he wrote:
“I imagine Lent for you and for me as a great departure from the greedy, anxious anti-neighborliness of our economy, a great departure from our exclusionary politics that fears the other, a great departure from self-indulgent consumerism that devours creation. And then an arrival in a new neighborhood, because it is a gift to be simple, it is a gift to be free; it is a gift to come down where we ought to be.”