Lent - Preparing Ourselves

Loving Father, please allow me this Lent to leave behind my old self and to prepare well for the new creation you make possible through the death and resurrection of your Son.

We mark other events in life by preparing ourselves. We don't go into a big job interview without having thought through answers to some basic questions. We don't pick up our sweetheart for a date without having showered and put on clean clothes and applied some sort of product to our hair. (We only get that sloppy after she's agreed to marry us.) Most of us don't even go to the grocery store without some plan as to what we need to buy.

And that is what Lent is, annually...a preparing for Easter... The whole concept of Lent - at one time a very foreign - is now so important to me. Specifically, the idea of a concentrated time of sloughing off the old self.

This I declare, brothers: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does corruption inherit incorruption. Behold, I tell you a mystery. We shall not all fall asleep, but we will all be changed, in an instant, in the blink of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.
1 Corinthians 15:50-52

Uniting ourselves into Christ's suffering, and strengthening our faith in the resurrection...

But if Christ is preached as raised from the dead, how can some among you say there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then neither has Christ been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then empty is our preaching; empty, too, is your faith. ..For if the dead are not raised, neither has Christ been raised, and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is vain; you are still in your sins...If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are the most pitiable people of all.
1 Corinthians 15:12-14, 16-17,19

A Prayer to Prepare for the Easter Sacraments
Guide me, O though great Redeemer,
Pilgrim through this barren land.
I am weak, but thou art mighty;
Hold me with thy powerful hand.
Bread of heaven, bread of heaven,
Feed me till I want no more.
Feed me till I want no more.


Nothing original here, today. Reflections on the Stations of the Cross will begin Monday - maybe sooner if I go somewhere that I have internet access this weekend...