Thanks to Dale Zanetti, Director of Adult Faith Formation, for this post.
Lent is coming soon. As a matter of fact, it starts on Ash Wednesday, February 26, 2020 this year. It will be here before we know it. This is a good time to get prepared. During Lent we have an opportunity to better ourselves, change our hearts and renew our spirits. What are some of the things we should be looking at? Mending relationships, lessening our worrying, changing a bad habit, living a better life and the like.
In Luke 9 Jesus summoned the crowd with his disciples and said to them, “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.”
We must practice self-denial, carrying our cross and following Jesus. If done in a prayerful way we can accomplish great things. To pray really means that we as Christians realize that by ourselves, with ourselves, and in ourselves we can do nothing – and therefore we don’t want to do anything in ourselves or by ourselves or in ourselves, but we rather want to do everything in God, with God, and through God. We must renew ourselves in Christ and he is always here to help us. This is an important part of the process of repentance.
And let’s not forget our families. Let’s get our families participating in Lenten activities by fasting of some kind, making sure we pray together, read the Bible and share our thoughts.
Just a few words about giving up something for Lent. It is more about giving up sin and moving closer to Jesus then actually denying ourselves anything. We should begin by letting go of the things that take our focus off of Jesus. We give up some small item and offer it as a sacrifice to God. When we deprive ourselves, we are reminded of what deprivation Jesus encountered for us
We also can add something to our devotion during this season. This can be done in conjunction with or in place of giving something up. Maybe it’s reading the Bible daily alone or with your children, doing a Lenten devotional, or choosing to do something within the community for the poor, ill or elderly.
If you are looking for some devotionals to utilize during this season, there is the “Word Among Us” which the church supplies. It is a daily devotional that you can find in the Literature and Brochure racks in the church.
So, give up those cookies, or make sure you are on time for meetings, add that new prayer exercise, or start a road of forgiveness and reconcile with that person. Whatever the sacrifice, whatever the act, know that it has the ability to make you a better person and that you can join that sacrifice with the sacrifice of Jesus. And then we can say like St. Paul. (Col 1:24) “….I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ on behalf of his body, which is the church….”) It may feel like loss at first, but what you will gain is indescribable.
Let’s make this our best Lent ever by becoming the people God intends us to be, changing our hearts and renewing our spirits.
Lent comes providentially to reawaken us, to shake us from our lethargy.
Our FORMED Recommendation for the Week
Audiobook (7 hours 40 minutes): Dayspring: A Novel by Harry Sylvester
Spencer Bain is a modern man of science, a university anthropologist doing fieldwork in a small New Mexican town. Used to long separations from his wife, a UCLA professor equally dedicated to her career, he is mostly untroubled by his infidelities, and hers; that is, until now.
In order to study the religious practices of the Penitentes, a brotherhood of local men who engage in severe, medieval penances, Bain feigns a conversion to Catholicism and participates in their Lenten observances, including their dramatic public procession on Good Friday.
Nothing in Bain’s skeptical academic training has prepared him for the profound remorse that he begins to experience. Though no sentimentalist with respect to the poor and ignorant who surround him, he cannot help but contrast the simple yet solid lives of the men and women he studies with his own fruitless relationships and those of the jaded, over-sexed sophisticates — the self-proclaimed artists and intellectuals — he considers his peers.
Artistically descriptive of the rugged Southwest and the people who dwell there, the novel also movingly portrays the inner landscape of a man coming to grips with his need for redemption. Author Harry Sylvester masterfully illustrates both the objective reality and the subjective experience of guilt and grace.
In order to study the religious practices of the Penitentes, a brotherhood of local men who engage in severe, medieval penances, Bain feigns a conversion to Catholicism and participates in their Lenten observances, including their dramatic public procession on Good Friday.
Nothing in Bain’s skeptical academic training has prepared him for the profound remorse that he begins to experience. Though no sentimentalist with respect to the poor and ignorant who surround him, he cannot help but contrast the simple yet solid lives of the men and women he studies with his own fruitless relationships and those of the jaded, over-sexed sophisticates — the self-proclaimed artists and intellectuals — he considers his peers.
Artistically descriptive of the rugged Southwest and the people who dwell there, the novel also movingly portrays the inner landscape of a man coming to grips with his need for redemption. Author Harry Sylvester masterfully illustrates both the objective reality and the subjective experience of guilt and grace.
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