What to give up for Lent when life already took so much

Lent arrived this year and you are already down to nothing. Maybe it was a diagnosis, a marriage, a job, a parent, a year you do not want to live through again. The question "what should I give up for Lent" lands strange in your ears, because life has been giving things up on your behalf for months now, without asking.

So before anything else, we want to say this plainly. Lent was never built for people with surplus to spare. It was built for ordinary human beings, and some years those human beings have already been stripped bare by circumstance before the season starts. That is not a failure of the practice. It is just where you are.

What the season is actually asking

Lent is forty days, echoing the forty years Israel spent in the wilderness and the forty days Jesus spent there before his work began. The tradition of giving something up grew out of that: a small, deliberate hunger, chosen on purpose, as a way of paying attention to God instead of to comfort.

Notice the word chosen. The whole practice assumes you have something left to choose. It assumes a person with enough stability to decide, calmly, to set aside chocolate or wine or scrolling for six weeks, and then go back to normal on Easter morning.

That is not cruelty built into the tradition. It is just an assumption that does not always hold. Some years the wilderness is not symbolic. It is a chemo schedule, or an empty side of the bed, or a bank account you cannot stop checking. You are not practicing hunger. You are living inside it.

If that is your year, you do not need another thing taken from you. You need a way to be honest in front of God about what has already gone.

A psalm written for exactly this

There is an old psalm, attributed to Asaph, written by someone in real trouble, not performing piety.

I will cry unto God with my voice, Even unto God with my voice; and he will give ear unto me. In the day of my trouble I sought the Lord: My hand was stretched out in the night, and slacked not; My soul refused to be comforted. I remember God, and am disquieted: I complain, and my spirit is overwhelmed.

Psalm 77:1-12

Read that again slowly. "My soul refused to be comforted." This is not a man pretending his faith has smoothed everything over. He is awake at night with his hand stretched out and nothing coming back. He asks the hard questions out loud: has God's lovingkindness run out, has his promise failed. The psalm does not rush to answer those questions. It sits with them for several verses before the writer decides, almost as an act of will, to remember what God has done before.

That order matters. Complaint first. Memory second. Not memory instead of complaint, erasing it, but memory alongside it. If this Lent you have nothing to give up because everything has already been taken, this psalm gives you permission to start exactly where Asaph started: with the honest, unresolved ache, said out loud to God rather than swallowed.

What rest looks like when you are the one carrying weight

There is a passage that gets quoted so often it can start to sound soft, but it was spoken to people genuinely worn down by labour and by religious obligation that had become one more weight to carry.

Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

Matthew 11:28-30

A yoke is not a vacation from work. It is the frame that lets two animals share a load instead of one animal pulling alone. Jesus is not offering an escape from your circumstances. He is offering to be the other side of the yoke, so the weight is no longer entirely on you.

If Lent, for you this year, is simply surviving what has already happened, this is not a betrayal of the season. Coming heavy laden and staying there, instead of pretending to be light, may be the most honest Lenten practice available to you.

If you still want to choose something

Some readers in hard seasons still want a practice, something small and deliberate alongside the grief, not instead of it. That is good too. It just needs to be sized correctly.

Consider giving up the performance of being fine. Not to anyone in particular, not as a dramatic announcement, just quietly, in your own prayers, stop editing what you say to God. Say what is actually true, the way the psalmist did, the way this line puts it:

Jehovah is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, And saveth such as are of a contrite spirit.

Psalm 34:17-18

A contrite spirit is not a performance. It is a heart that has stopped pretending. If there is one thing worth giving up this Lent, it might be the effort it takes to sound okay when you are not.

Or you might give up the need to fix it yourself for thirty minutes a day, and instead sit, even in silence, with the oldest image of being cared for that we have:

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; He leadeth me beside still waters. He restoreth my soul.

Psalm 23:1-4

A shepherd does not ask the sheep to walk faster through the valley. The shepherd just stays close. That is a smaller claim than healing, and a truer one for most ordinary days: not that the valley disappears, but that you are not asked to walk it unaccompanied.

Something small enough for today

You do not need to decide your whole Lent in one sitting. Pick one of these, whichever is lightest to lift right now: say one honest sentence to God about what has actually been taken from you this year, or read Psalm 23 slowly once before bed tonight, no agenda beyond that.

If you want somewhere to put the specific thing weighing on you, you can start a prayer at /pray, written in your own words, with nothing performed about it. There is no version of Lent that requires you to arrive with more than you have.