To ask women “what are you giving up for Lent this year?” can feel almost insulting.

In the last week alone:

In a massacre that killed eight people, a man targeted Asian American women in their workplaces. He murdered six of them. Why? Because they were “temptations.”

Doctors reported a rise in alcoholic liver disease among young women during the pandemic. They’ve described the surge as “off the charts,” “sharp,” and “astronomical.”

This and more amidst a pandemic landscape that has cost women so much.

Women too often find their personhood and struggles, even their very lives, dismissed. But dismissal is not what Lent requires.

Rather, Jesus invites us through Lent to behold our loves—to name what matters to us and trust that he smiles upon our desires. Only then are we beckoned to “practice intentionality, to examine our habits, and to practice disciplining desires of all kinds,” as Kerilyn Harkaway-Krieger puts it in “Pandemic and Penitence: COVID-19 Has Re-Ordered What Matters Most.”

As we seek to order our loves according to the way of Christ during this Lenten season, may we remember this beautiful truth: women, as image-bearers of Jesus, are never dismissed in his eyes, but are deemed a love of the highest order.