Struggling with Lent

For the past four years I have been in fellowship with approximately 5-7 churches in my community. We meet monthly for lunch and laughter. Other than that, we plan a few joint worship services and seek ways to serve our community together. It has been one of the most enriching experiences of my life. One of the annual worship series we put together is a Wednesday night Lenten Worship Series. Each Wednesday night during Lent one church hosts the service and a different pastor preaches. for the past three years our church has been only tangentially involved. This year we've been asked to host one of the services. This year we are doing a series of teaching segments related to Lent and our church has been asked to explain the practice of footwashing. This actually goes back to a Thanksgiving Eve service we hosted for the community in 2001, but that's another story. So anyway, I've been struggling with Lent. About four years ago I recovered from my childhood the practices of Advent. It has added such a rich blessing to my Christian experience leading up to Christmas. It give my wife and I the resources to teach our children what is truly valuable about Christmas. But I have no memory to recover related to Lent. Adventism, in general does such a poor job with Easter that, frankly, I struggle with Easter as well. So every year I go a bit deeper and I am being discipled by the men and women who ministry with my in my community