When you reach Lent empty: the quiet power of speaking life anyway

Lent was a very real thing when I was growing up. It wasn’t abstract or optional. On Ash Wednesday, we went to school with a visible cross marked on our foreheads, a public reminder that this was a season of reflection and return. At home, fasting and prayer were woven into daily life. Lent wasn’t something we talked about; it was something we entered.

Back then, Lent felt weighty in the right way. It wasn’t about self-improvement or willpower. Instead, it was about consecration, denying the flesh so the spirit could become more attentive to God. Fasting and prayer weren’t done to make God move; they were done to help us hear more clearly.

READ MORE: My encouragement to fast this Lent

Years later, when I moved to the UK, my relationship with Lent shifted again. In workplaces and everyday conversations, Lent often arrived as a discussion about habits and substitutes, a list of lifestyle experiments. People spoke cheerfully about giving up chocolate, social media, coffee, or television. I remember feeling quietly unsettled, not judgemental, just confused. It felt as though something sacred had been made smaller. More manageable. Optional. Almost reduced to a wellness challenge rather than a sacred invitation.

By then, I was attending a pentecostal church, where fasting and prayer are practised regularly throughout the year, often outside the traditional church calendar. Lent wasn’t emphasised in the same way, yet it never disappeared from my consciousness. Instead, it stayed with me as a spiritual undercurrent, reminding me that certain seasons invite us not to add more, but to strip back.

READ MORE: What does God have in store for you this Lent season?

Over time, that’s what Lent became for me: not a rule to observe or a habit to announce, but a quiet return. And as the years passed, I began to realise something else too, we often reduce Lent not because we’re shallow, but because we’re tired.

After all, many of us arrive at Lent already carrying full lives, full minds, and full hearts.

After all, many of us arrive at Lent already carrying full lives, full minds, and full hearts. Work pressure. Emotional fatigue. Quiet disappointments we don’t yet have language for. So when Lent meets us in that state, the question isn’t What should I give up? It’s What do I do when I have nothing left to offer?

There were Lent seasons when I didn’t arrive strong or spiritually organised. Instead, I arrived already empty. Not rebellious, just tired. I didn’t have the energy for grand fasts or carefully planned disciplines. Henri Nouwen once wrote that Lent is not about adding new disciplines, but about “creating space where God can come.” That line stayed with me, because space is exactly what emptiness creates, if we let it.

READ MORE: I didn’t think I had an addiction to technology but my Lent fast revealed the truth

What I did have in those seasons was Scripture, and the practice of speaking it aloud. In those moments, speaking life became my way of staying present with God. Not loudly. Not dramatically. Sometimes it was a single verse whispered before sleep. Other times, it was a line of truth repeated slowly on the commute. I wasn’t trying to achieve anything. I was anchoring myself. Gradually, I began to notice something gentle but profound: Lent didn’t require me to arrive full. It welcomed me empty.

Speaking Scripture aloud didn’t instantly fill the emptiness, but it steadied me inside it. Verses like “The Lord is my shepherd; I lack nothing” or “God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, love, and a sound mind” became companions. I wasn’t declaring them to force change; I was speaking them to remember what was already true.

Over time, Lent stopped feeling like something I had to “do properly” and became a space where God met me honestly.

Over time, Lent stopped feeling like something I had to “do properly” and became a space where God met me honestly. The practice of speaking life didn’t replace fasting or prayer, instead, it deepened them. It quietened the noise enough for me to listen again. That’s when I came to understand Lent not as deprivation, but as return. A return to God’s voice. A return to truth. A return to grace. So if you reach Lent this year feeling weary, distracted, or spiritually flat, please know this: you are not late, and you are not disqualified. Lent doesn’t demand strength; it welcomes honesty. You don’t need a dramatic plan or a public declaration of what you’re giving up.

Sometimes, Lent begins with one gentle sentence spoken aloud in the middle of an ordinary moment. Speaking life may not change everything at once, but it will remind you where hope lives. And often, that is how Lent does its quiet work: not by asking us to try harder, but by inviting us to return, one truthful word at a time.

If you’d like a simple set of Ash Wednesday declarations to pray through, I’ve shared one on my blog.