We Will Rise Again From Ashes

Happy Ash Wednesday, all!

Here's why Lent is amazing: Every single day of the year, we should hear and respond to God's call to be closer to Him, but during Lent, we are called to take on His sacrifice in a more personal and devout way.  God says there is a time for everything (It's in Ecclesiastes 3, which is also the same place we find "All came from dust and to dust it shall return") and Lent is the time to put ourselves with Jesus in the desert, to learn, grow, listen, and to gain strength and knowledge for the next thing God calls us too. It seems kind of like school to me.  In life, we are never ever going to stop learning, but we do have a certain number of years set apart specifically for the learning process - which then becomes a foundation for the rest of our lifetime of knowledge.  Lent is like our spiritual school, where God teaches us about who He is and all He has done for us, and why that matters.  Then armed with our new understanding of the Ultimate Sacrifice, we can go out into the world and use it to learn about and understand everything else.


I have been praying for a few days now about what to hand over to God for Lent.  For me personally, this year, I am not feeling called to give anything up unless I am replacing it with something better. I think my goal as a Catholic, as a woman of God, and as a living breathing human being is to be aware.  I want to be aware that God is working, that He is alive and well in the world, but that He also died, and that death was for me and will not be in vain unless I make it that way by dismissing its power.  I'm not really sure, however, how I am going to do this. Fervent prayer and picking one Bible verse to apply to my day each new day is what I am going to try!

So today's verse (since I have already brought up the chapter) will be an awareness of God's infinite wisdom and plan, and the fact that it is not our job to figure it out:

"He has made everything appropriate in its time. He has also set eternity in their heart, yet so that man will not find out the work which God has done from the beginning even to the end." Ecclesiastes 3:11

Amen!