A Lent Devotional for Women: Releasing What You Were Never Meant to Carry
⏱ 5 min read
The Weight You’ve Been Calling Faithfulness
Lent asks a plain question, if you let it: what are you carrying that was never yours to carry?
Not sin—that one’s answer is old and settled. Something quieter. The marriage you’re managing alone. The sibling’s crisis that became your calendar. The version of yourself your mother needed you to be, that you never put down because no one told you that you could. A lent devotional for women in this particular season isn’t about giving up chocolate. It’s about noticing what you’ve been holding, out of habit, long after the reason for holding it passed.
Forty days is short. Long enough to notice a weight. Not long enough to fake your way through pretending it isn’t there.
Why Lent Is the Honest Season
Most of the calendar rewards momentum. Lent doesn’t. It asks you to walk toward something hard—toward a hill, toward an ending—without rushing past the walking part. That’s uncomfortable for a woman who has spent years being the one who holds things together. Slowing down feels like letting go of the rope. But the rope was never load-bearing the way you thought.
Scripture doesn’t promise the load lifts on your schedule. It promises something steadier:
> “But they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.” (Isaiah 40:31, KJV)
Read it again slowly. It doesn’t say the waiting ends quickly. It says strength is renewed in the waiting—not after it, as a reward for finishing.
What You Were Never Meant to Carry
There’s a specific kind of tiredness that comes from carrying something that was never sized for you. Not the ordinary weariness of a hard week, but the deeper ache of holding a role, a guilt, or a person’s outcome that belongs to God and not to you. You can love someone and still not be able to fix them. You can be responsible and still not be the one who has to hold every piece.
David wrote from that place too:
> “Wait on the LORD: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart: wait, I say, on the LORD.” (Psalm 27:14, KJV)
Notice the repetition—wait, I say, on the LORD. He says it twice because the first time didn’t take. That’s honest. Most of us need to hear a thing more than once before we actually let it change what we’re doing with our hands.
The Waiting Isn’t Wasted
It’s tempting, in a season built around giving something up, to treat the empty space as a problem to solve quickly. But Lamentations—a book written out of real ruin, not a devotional metaphor—says something different about the wait itself:
> “The LORD is good unto them that wait for him, to the soul that seeketh him. It is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the LORD.” (Lamentations 3:25–26, KJV)
Quietly wait. Not anxiously manage. Not white-knuckle your way to Easter morning. The word is quiet, and quiet is not the same as passive—it’s the opposite of the constant low-grade vigilance that carrying too much requires.
The psalmist puts it even more plainly:
> “I wait for the LORD, my soul doth wait, and in his word do I hope.” (Psalm 130:5, KJV)
That’s a full sentence about doing, essentially, nothing visible. And it’s still called hope.
If Lent Feels Like It’s Taking Too Long
Some years the forty days drag. The thing you’re releasing doesn’t release easily—an old resentment, a habit of over-functioning for people who never asked you to, a grief that Easter won’t actually resolve. Habakkuk wrote to a people watching disaster unfold in real time, and this is what he was told to say:
> “For the vision is yet for an appointed time, but at the end it shall speak, and not lie: though it tarry, wait for it; because it will surely come, it will not tarry.” (Habakkuk 2:3, KJV)
Though it tarry. Scripture doesn’t pretend delay isn’t delay. It just refuses to call delay the same thing as absence.
And there’s a companion word for the woman whose instinct, when carrying too much, is to grip harder:
> “Rest in the LORD, and wait patiently for him: fret not thyself because of him who prospereth in his way, because of the man who bringeth wicked devices to pass.” (Psalm 37:7, KJV)
Fretting is its own kind of carrying. Lent, done honestly, asks you to set that down too.
A Practice, Not a Performance
If you want to keep a Lent devotional for women this season, keep it small and specific rather than aspirational. Each morning, name one thing—out loud or on paper—that you’re setting down that day. Not forever, necessarily. Just for that day. Some days it will be a worry about someone else’s choices. Some days it will be the pressure to have the right words for your own grief. Write the verse alongside it, not as a magic fix, but as a place to put your hand while you let go.
Paul, writing to a church that hadn’t seen its hope resolved either, said it this way:
> “But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it.” (Romans 8:25, KJV)
And David again, near the start of a psalm that begins in a horrible pit and ends in a new song:
> “I waited patiently for the LORD; and he inclined unto me, and heard my cry.” (Psalm 40:1, KJV)
That’s the shape of the whole season, really. Not resolution on demand. Attention paid, patiently, to a God who does incline toward the waiting.
Near the End of the Forty Days
Easter doesn’t erase what Lent uncovered. You’ll likely still be tired on the other side of it, still carrying some of what you’re carrying now. But you may know, by then, which parts were never yours to hold—and have practiced, in small daily motions, what it feels like to set one thing down at a time. That’s not nothing. For a woman who has spent a long time being the one who holds it all, that’s most of the way to everything.
Some women find it helps to have a slower, guided place to keep this practice going past the forty days—somewhere the releasing doesn’t have to end when the season does.
If this season of releasing what you were never meant to carry resonated, Spiritual Workbook for Women — When Releasing What You Were Never Meant to Carry Again was written as a slower companion for exactly this — 140 days of the same quiet, unhurried practice, for whenever you’re ready to keep going past Easter.
