Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Changed by the Resurrection

Note: Thank you to everyone who inquired about my new baby. Mommy and Baby are doing great. 



Growing from Lent

So its the Tuesday after Easter, your Peeps are eaten you have drank sodas that you gave up for forty days, but are you changed?   Yes, it is okay to go back to the things you gave up (unless is was a sinful habit, if you gave up smoking for 40 days don't go back), but are you changed by your lent and Holy week?

If you are not changed then what was the point for you.  Jesus gave himself for us and we should be changed by it.  If we go back to our selves of that we were on the day before ash Wednesday then our external lenten sacrifices did not change our internal spiritual self.    The purpose of the external sacrifice is to lead to internal changes.  We should be different people than we were before we started our lenten journey.  Not dramatically different but more inclined to the direction of Christ.  We may not notice this at first but if we look at ourselves introspectively we may see small changes.  Suppose I gave up television.  After Lent I may go back to watching TV but I may recall fondly the time I had playing board games during my time away from TV during lent and my watch less TV after Lent.  Not at dramatic change but a change none the less.

Lent is a time for new experience through sacrifices and alms giving.  Maybe I helped out at a soup kitchen for the first time maybe I would like to do that again every so often.  Not at dramatic change but a change none the less.

Whatever buds your lenten journey produced need to be cultivated and grown to be incorporated into your spiritual journey.  Lent is a time for planting and Easter is a time to continue process to maturity.

There is still time.  

Easter didn't end on Sunday.  The resurrection may have happened but Easter is just beginning, we still have 40 more days of Easter.

This is the time to see what you want to keep from Lent and what didn't work for you.  Some things no matter how hard we try just don't work.  Once for Lent i decided that for lunch everyday I was only going to have soup.  So for 40 days every day at lunch I had soup.  It was a great lent I lost 15 pounds.  But by the end of it I was done with soup.  Some of the things I did that lent brought me closer to God but the soup was a form of fasting I felt afterwards that I might have gotten closer to God other ways.  I still eat soup but everyday soup is not a way for me personally to connect with God.  I was noble in my aspirations behind the soup but the practice just didn't work.  Also during that lent I made a practice of says more of a variety of prayers.  That worked for me and afterwards I had more prayers to my prayer inventory.  But you have 40 days of Easter to work it out to get it goig all year round.


We can be like the Apostles and encounter the risen Christ.         


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