That's the occasion when grads would return home to re-visit the people and places that played a formative role in their lives.

Aside from the big hair and wide lapels on those polaroids in a shoebox somewhere under your bed, this was an occasion to pay some sort of honor or tribute to the positive influences that shaped us into who we are today.

Ideally, home is where we learned positive values, habits, and priorities - of honesty, fairness, justice, generosity, acceptance, and forgiveness. And returning home can bring recalibration and renewal to lives that may have drifted far from this.

In this sense, let me suggest that Lent is a sort of homecoming.

Today, Ash Wednesday, kicks off a 40-day journey of rediscovery, culminating in Easter, God's great declaration that no matter how far we've strayed or how completely we've snubbed, forgiveness is possible, restoration is possible - we can return home, to God, to Christ, to love.

A guiding question for me this year is, "What are you optimizing for?" In other words, all this money you're making, all this exercising, learning, watching, reading, spending - what's the end goal? Is the way I am now living bringing me closer to Christ and helping me make a world I want to live in?

On this journey we ask: is all that I'm thinking, doing, and being, pointed toward home? Are my habits, attitudes, and goals aligned with where I want to go and who I want to become? Lent can be a life-altering exercise in recalibration, getting us back on track and back in the game.

Andiamo! Let's go home.