"Today, I am announcing that next week I'll be announcing that in forty days I'll be...

An army of presidential candidates are forming exploratory committees. They are tempted to run for president and so they are testing the waters. Indeed "temptation" comes from a Latin root---temptare --- meaning “to touch, to try or test, to feel experimentally.” Most do not jump into a public campaign head first. For some, the why’s and wherefore’s probably take up to 40 days.

Scriptures read at the beginning of Lent tell of Jesus going into the desert to pray and contemplate the shape of his public ministry. He spends forty days asking himself and his God what it would mean to become “Jesus of Nazareth.” I don’t mean to be blithe, but that sounds exploratory to me. He faces three key choices of what kind of leader, what kind of person, he will be--- choices we also face--- in the form of “Satan’s Temptations”:

1.) “If you’re hungry, turn some stones into bread; that’s easy.” The temptation is the quick fix, to deal with the external illusion of a problem and ignore its internal truth. How often are we tempted to treat the symptom and not the problem?

2.) “Grab all the power and glory.” The need for all the power (and its rationale, “think of all the good I could do…”) is more than an occupational hazard for leaders, it is out-and-out pathology.

3.) “Throw yourself off a cliff, and let the angels rescue you.” – Satan keeps saying,
“Prove yourself. Show them what you can do, if you really are who you say.” The temptation is to be spectacular, to constantly prove oneself to the accompaniment of fireworks and drum rolls.

[The other side of these temptations is to think of ourselves as irrelevant (“I have nothing to say…”) powerless (“I can’t do it by myself.”) and utterly mundane (“the devil wouldn’t be interested in me.”)]

When the “temptation” before us is clearly labeled Good for You or Bad for You, or HAPPINESS or SADNESS, most of us have the sense (grace) to know what to do. But how often are our choices that clear? Most of the time we have to test the waters for ourselves. Sometimes we take over 40 days. Throughout the testing, the touching, the experimenting, we pray for wisdom and grace to grow into our choices.

TPM (some of these ideas come from Rabbi Harold Kushner.)