The rain of the Flood fell for forty days and forty nights, just as long as Moses communed with God on the mountaintop and as Elijah journeyed to reach the cave where he’d meet God in a still, small voice. (Genesis 7:12; Exodus 24:18; 2 Kings 19:8-12) Jesus wrestled with his demons for forty days after his baptism; he appeared to the disciples for forty days after his resurrection before ascending into heaven forever. (Mark 1:13; Acts 1:3)

“Forty days” is an interesting length of time. It’s not forever, as any of us who’ve counted the 346 days since our last “normal” Sunday know. But by no means is it a short amount of time, as any of us giving something up or taking something on for Lent will learn. The forty days from Ash Wednesday to Easter are just the right amount of time, it seems, for us to speak to God and listen for God’s voice; to struggle with temptation and witness miracles; to journey across the desert or try to stay afloat in our hermetically-sealed arks.

Except they aren’t forty days, are they?

You’ll notice, if you do the math, that there are forty-six days until Easter. You’ll notice, too, if you’re very bored during a Sunday service and start starting at the bulletin, that we call them Sundays in Lent and not Sundays of Lent. Each Sunday during this season is a miniature Easter, a joyful feast plopped in among forty days of solemn fasts, but not one of them; so the traditional fasts of Lent are relaxed on Sundays, and the forty-days of Lent are really forty-six, minus Sundays.

There’s a power in that idea, for me, this year. This winter has been unrelenting in its monotony. Day after freezing day, I wish for a break—for one trip to a library, one visit with family, one warm spring day to play outside. We live our ordinary lives in natural patterns of work and rest, of stress and relaxation, of business and leisure, but there’s no such thing as a COVID vacation. (Unless, I suppose, New Zealand would let you in.) I think one of the many difficult things about this year has been its refusal to relax its grip: an Easter with little joy, a summer that felt like it never really began, a Christmas strange and sad for so many of us. We need that break, one day in seven, to make it through the other days.

I’m sorry to say I haven’t solved that problem. If only any of us could! But if the pandemic won’t relax its grip, we may have to loosen ours; to take one day out of seven, and let go of our resentments and frustrations, anxieties and self-criticisms, and simply be who we are, as we are, where we are.

So if you do nothing else to mark this Lent, try to loosen the pressure you put on yourself, just one day out of seven, to somehow be okay in extraordinary times. God knows that will be hard enough work for one Lent!