But today I also read these words: you prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. I am startled to realize this isn't actually what I hope for. I want my enemies far from me. Behind careful borders and appropriate boundaries. But that's not what God promises

“I imagine Lent for you and for me as a great departure from the greedy, anxious antineighborliness 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.”

― Walter Brueggemann, A Way Other Than Our Own: Devotions for Lent

The crowded road looms long and dusty. She is weary.  But she has come too far and endured too much to turn back now.