It conveys a moving of our minds, a shifting, an expansion of our mind. It can be said to mean, thinking/seeing beyond where your mind is now.

    I am not sure where we got the notion that repentance meant some kind of personal shame, some way to show Jesus just how bad we felt about ourselves.  When Jesus called people to repent,, he was inviting them from the patterns, choices and habits that choked their lives into a freedom, a deliverance, into choices that fed, nourished and made them one with themselves, God and all around them.  'Give all you own to the poor'- it wasn't simply a call to socialism, that would be too simplistic and insulting.  He was inviting the man to leave the things that possessed him.  When he invites the woman at the well to call her husband (having a good hunch she had several men in her life) he is not trying to demean her character, he is inviting her to see that none of them can ultimately give her life and intimacy she that she is trying to find in them; he invites her to see that it can only be found in herself and through God.

    Ash Wednesday is that day when we got honest with ourselves about the addictions, the trade offs, the selling of our hopes, the demeaning compromises we have made thinking that all the above is what will still our heart, create intimacy and numb our self asserted shame.  To that Jesus calls, "Repent."  Let go the substances that pretend to calm- be they chemical, vocational or relational.  Let go the idols that pretend to bring security and peace, be they 'stuff/things', titles, or violence to individuals or groups.

   Change your mind about what quiets the soul, what consoles the heart, what feeds the dreams.  Step outside of yourself long enough to see what Jesus sees, what God sees.  "Is there no one left to condemn you?  Than neither do I."  So hears the woman caught in adultery (by the way, where was the guy?)  "Who told you that you were naked?"  So says God to Adam and Eve when they become ashamed and conceal themselves.  Hear both saying, "Change your mind!"

    This Lent, what is God asking us to change about our mind?