With a Subtitle: He wasn’t trying to put me on the spot. He just wanted to know.

A brief Excerpt: Lent is a season of preparation for Easter, encouraging believers to emulate Jesus’ forty days of prayer and fasting. It is a time for honest, personal answers to faith-related questions.

The Author is: Dave Hallmon

We were in the post-service shuffle on Ash Wednesday (February 18, 2026) just the other night. Grabbing coats, car keys, and a few boys pretending they weren’t listening while absolutely listening.

Someone asked if we could get ice cream, and I said “no.”

My son was trying to explain the ashes. Another friend asked if it was OK to wash them off. Another said he thought he had seen a different religion do this, too.

Then my son’s friend looked up and asked, simply and without any embarrassment at all, “So what actually is Lent? Is it just the forty days before Easter?”

The parking lot got a little quieter. At least inside me.

I knew the answer. I’ve known it for years. But standing there, looking at a kid who genuinely wanted to understand, I realized something uncomfortable: I’d never actually had to explain it to someone. I’m sure I asked it once. Not sure to whom.

I’d carried this answer like a key I’d never been asked to use.

And in that moment, trying to find words for it, I noticed something else. I wasn’t entirely sure my answer was as solid as I’d assumed.

That question didn’t just ask me about Lent. It asked me what I actually believe, and why.

Honest questions, holy ground

If you’ve found your way to this series before, you know Third Door on the Left was built for exactly this kind of moment. Not to perform answers, but to walk toward them honestly, without shame on either side.

Here’s what I’ve learned, slowly and sometimes reluctantly: when a new believer — or just someone curious — asks a sincere question, something sacred can happen in the exchange. But only if you let it.

The question doesn’t just serve the asker. It serves you too.

It has a way of walking you back to Scripture, back to the foundation, back to the uncomfortable but clarifying question: Do I actually believe this, was I told to believe this, or did I inherit it somewhere along the way?

There’s grace in the asking. But there’s also grace in being asked.

With the power of the Holy Spirit, both people can leave the conversation changed. But it starts with being honest enough to let it happen.

Two clocks, one journey

The question my son’s friend asked is one many people carry, perhaps embarrassed to voice it. If Lent borrows its forty days from Jesus’ time in the desert (which happened at the beginning of His ministry), then why does Lent deposit us at Holy Week, before the cross?

Doesn’t that feel like starting a story in chapter one and then skipping to the end?

It does. And that’s exactly the confusion worth naming.

Lent was never designed to walk us through Jesus’ biography in order. It was designed to walk us through His method.

Lent represents His forty days of focused prayer and fasting, which prepared Him for the years of ministry that followed — walking with us as fully man and fully God.

So when we arrive at the holiest days of the year, the hope is that we’re not distracted, not numb, not rushing. We’re present.

The English word “Lent” comes from an Old English root, lencten, meaning spring — the “lengthening of light.”

Early Christians called it Quadragesima: simply “the fortieth.” No single person invented the name. The church inherited and translated language across centuries, all pointing at the same destination: preparation for Easter.

Even the name is humble. Spring. Lengthening light. A season that admits winter was real, but insists it won’t be final.

Training ground, not time machine

Augustine understood Lent as a season of purification. Not to earn God’s approval, but to remove what’s in the way of receiving what God is already offering.

The fasting, the prayer, the silence — none of it is performance. It’s preparation.

Think of training for something that genuinely matters. A long-distance runner doesn’t race during training. But without it, she can’t hold herself together when the real thing gets hard.

The training is what makes her capable of finishing what she came to finish.

Lent is just that.

Forty days of clearing the clutter. Not to impress God. Not to collect spiritual grades.

It’s designed to arrive at Holy Week with our hearts actually open.

Because Holy Week is not a Hallmark montage. No matter how many bunnies, eggs, and baskets are drawn on cards.

Palm Sunday carries fragile praise over a shadow no one wants to name.

Maundy Thursday puts you in a room where love kneels and gives itself to people who are about to fail.

Good Friday does not let you make peace with small sin or mild grace.

And Holy Saturday — the silence, the unresolved ache, the not-knowing — may be the most relatable day on the entire church calendar. Because many of us spend a lot of time waiting for answers.

That’s a lot to receive if you sprint.

You skip a meal during Lent and notice how fast irritation rises. You put down your phone for an hour and discover how loud your inner life actually is.

You try to pray and realize comfort had been doing more of your coping than you knew.

The desert reveals. Grace rebuilds.

Lent doesn’t make the cross bigger. It brings perspective to the ache around the edges of our own stories, doesn’t it?

The edge we keep losing, the season that restores it

Here’s what I didn’t expect standing in that parking lot: I needed the question as much as he did.

Not because I didn’t know the answer. Because I was being forced to go find it — at least find it in a way that was actually mine.

Not borrowed from one of my favorite Christian authors, Quora, or Reddit. Not inherited from a tradition I’ve never questioned.

One that’s just mine. Tested, turned over, and taken back to God’s Word — and held up to the light.

That’s what honest questions do. They don’t just open a door for the person asking. They open one for us, too.

Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another. — Proverbs 27:17 (ESV)

Sometimes the most faithful thing you can say is, “I know this matters, but let me make sure I’m giving you the real answer and not just the easy one.”

Sometimes it’s, “I don’t have that fully worked out yet, but let’s go find it together.”

Both of those responses are honest. Both of them are more useful than a confident answer built on an assumption.

The conversation could have ended with a simple, “Yeah. It’s 40 days till Easter,” but I’m glad it didn’t.

If you’re new to faith, or new to church, or new to asking questions out loud, hear this clearly: don’t stop.

You are not asking the wrong things.

The questions you’re carrying are doing something in you — and possibly in the people you’re asking. Questions that neither of you fully understands.

Those are the good ones.

So ask them anyway. That’s not a weakness. That’s how faith grows.

Don’t rush Holy Week. Don’t minimize Good Friday.

Let the forty days be forty days. Think of it as a long, honest walk toward something that deserves your full attention when you arrive.

Take your questions with you. They belong on the road.

And when Easter comes, you won’t just hear the “Good news.” You’ll be ready to receive it.