In her 2016 book, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, psychologist Angela Duckworth explores what drives high achievement and personal success. She argues that, contrary to popular belief, talent alone is not the determining factor of success. Instead, grit—”a combination of passion and perseverance over the long term”—is the most reliable predictor of success across diverse fields. Duckworth noticed that the most successful individuals were not always the most naturally gifted. Rather, they were those who consistently put in effort, endured challenges, and remained committed to their goals for years.

Duckworth identifies four key components of grit:

• Interest – Gritty people are deeply passionate about what they do. Their interest is not fleeting but endures over time.
• Practice – They engage in deliberate practice, striving to improve daily, often working through frustration and failure.
• Purpose – They believe their work matters and often connect their goals to something larger than themselves.
• Hope – Even when faced with setbacks, they maintain a belief that their efforts will eventually lead to progress. This form of resilience fuels long-term perseverance.

According to Duckworth, grit is not just a matter of personal willpower. It is also nurtured through relationships, culture, and context. External expectations and support light the fire of internal motivation. By surrounding ourselves—and others—with an atmosphere that challenges and uplifts, we help grit take root and grow.

What Duckworth recognized as essential to achievement in the world, Christians have long recognized as essential to progress in the spiritual life. Life in Christ is a gritty business animated by love and grace, grounded in community, but still a gritty business. Interest, practice, purpose, hope, relationships, culture, and context must all play their part.

Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. (Matthew 16:24-25 – NRSV)

We boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. (Romans 5:2-5 – NRSV)

For at least the last seventeen hundred years¹, most Christians have set apart the 40-days prior to Easter (commonly known as Lent) to be a season of sustained focus on sacrifice and self-discipline, ordered towards a deeper spiritual communion with the Father; in other words, a season for cultivating spiritual grit. Lent is a time of intentional struggle —against temptation, distraction, and spiritual complacency — and that struggle is instrumental in cultivating the kind of grit essential to spiritual maturity.

Though the formal observance of Lent does not explicitly appear in the Bible, its spiritual logic and symbolism are deeply biblical. The number 40 has deep biblical resonance:

• 40 days of rain in the flood (Genesis 7:12)
• 40 years of Israel’s wandering in the desert (Numbers 14:33)
• 40 days Moses spent on Mount Sinai (Exodus 34:28)
• 40 days Elijah journeyed to Mount Horeb (1 Kings 19:8)

These were all times of testing, purification, and transformation — themes central to Lent.

The architype of Lent is Jesus’ 40 days in the wilderness (Matthew 4:1–11, Luke 4:1–13). In preparation for His public ministry, Jesus is led by the Spirit into a place of solitude, fasting, and temptation. It is a gritty time of self-denial, communion with the Father, and spiritual conflict.

From early on, Lent involved fasting, often eating only one meal a day with abstinence from meat, dairy, and sometimes wine or oil. Prayer and almsgiving were added as spiritual disciplines to accompany fasting. It was never a matter of deprivation for deprivation’s sake, but of depriving the body, for the purpose of redirecting focus toward God and others. Through prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, Christians are invited to walk a symbolic path with Jesus through the wilderness. It is not a sprint but a slow, interior marathon requiring discipline, focus, and constancy. It is a pilgrimage of the heart toward the Cross and Resurrection. It is the cultivation of grit for heaven’s sake. Persisting in daily spiritual practices (like prayer, reflection, acts of charity) reinforces the habit of showing up faithfully, even when it feels dry or fruitless.

Lent is the season of grit because it calls us to journey with Christ through spiritual effort, reflection, and sacrifice. It is a time when we are invited to train our hearts in endurance —not for endurance’s sake, but for love’s sake. Grit matters because it makes love steadfast, hope resilient, and character unshakable. In Lent, we learn that holiness is not found in brief moments of inspiration, but in daily faithfulness through difficulty — a faithfulness that ultimately leads to Easter joy.

At Ambleside, we are a people gritty in pursuit of Christ and His Kingdom. If you have not been doing so, it is not too late to spend a week in some small, gritty, Lenten discipline.

Bill St. Cyr

Co-Founder and Director of Training

Ambleside Schools International