Weekly THIS AND THAT for February 14, 2010: "No" to "Yes": Six Lenten Suggestions

This and That:
“No to Yes: Six Lenten Suggestions”

As we prepare for Lent 2010, please don’t forget about:

1. Lenten Family Fridays
2. Friday Stations of the Cross at 2:00pm in church on February 19th, March 5th, 12th and the 19th.
3. Adult morning of recollection in the church on Thursday, February 18th from 9:30am to 11:00am.

Lent is best viewed as a journey; a journey from “no,” to “yes.” These “no’s” include: deceit, infidelity, betrayals, broken relationships, the moral destroyers of our society, and our own sins that we will smear on our foreheads, in the form of ashes, for all to see on Wednesday. We will seek the Easter waters, forty days hence, that will wash them away. On Easter Sunday, we will be challenged to start all over again as we are asked:

➢ Do you renounce Satan? And all his ways? And all his works?

➢ Do you believe in God the Father? In Jesus Christ? In the Holy Spirit?

We get forty days to work up to our answer, to say, yes. We all have our own Lenten strategies. Permit me to offer my own suggestions, six of them, three to do, three to start.

➢ First one to do: Say no to indiscriminate television watching. TV is commercial television, designed to create needs and make you buy what you don’t really need. Much of it is filled with soft and hardcore pornography and values that are contrary to the gospel. You really can’t absorb those powerful images day in and day out without being affected and spiritually desensitized. Be very selective in your television watching.

➢ Second one: Say “yes” to spiritual reading. Buy a little pocket New Testament and read a passage a day from the gospels. Listen to audiotapes or CD’s on the way to work, school or shopping.

➢ Third: coffee can the table. That is, put a coffee can on the family table and have everyone empty his or her change into it. That goes to the poor.

Now we come to three that are a little more personal, a little more difficult, a little more long range.

➢ Fourth suggestion: be an encourager. That is, at work, at school give an encouraging word, the encouraging deed, at least once a week. For example, make the Wednesdays of Lent your encouraging days. So, on Wednesdays at least, be a repairer of broken spirits, a healer of wounds, a harbinger of hope. Speak an encouraging word for every put-down remark. Give a pat for every shove.

➢ Fifth suggestion – and this is tough: prepare to heal, work up to it. That is, make an attempt at reconnecting a broken connection that often, in my experience, starts out with a misunderstanding.

➢ Sixth and final suggestion: Reconnect basics. Put aside a day every week or two when friends, spouses, or families reconnect. Or, I guess I’m saying, review that reason you’re doing all that work and all that running around like crazy to begin with. Too often today, we act like we need to “do” and “get” things. It is time to reconnect with the importance of relationships. Even God, within Godself, is in relationship!

All six are ways of getting from Ash Wednesday no to Easter yes!

Happy Lent, Love,

Jack