Blessed is the Kingdom

Seeking The Kingdom In All Things

What are you doing for Lent?

What are you giving up for Lent? This is an often asked question among Catholics and increasingly among other members of the Christian faith. I have long believed a better question is, What are you doing for Lent? This might mean giving up something, or in other words, fasting from the things that lead us away from God or that take up some of the space that God means to occupy in our lives. But it might also mean doing acts of kindness for others that we often forget. It may simply mean finding more time for prayer. Ultimately it means to do the things that we are called to do regularly as Christians, but just as regularly fail to do.

This year my goal for Lent is threefold. I hope to spend less time online, a difficult task for a blogger and prodigious user of the internet. I hope to give more to those in need, with a focus on our parish goal this year of feeding the hungry. Maybe most importantly, I want to make more time to connect personally first of all with God and secondly with others in our parish that I don’t know well.

What are your plans for Lent?

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This entry was posted by on Tuesday, March 8th, 2011 at 10:09 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

About The Author

Fr. Christian is the pastor of St. Thomas the Apostle Church in Lenoir City, TN.

Comments

  • http://twitter.com/prestonyancey Preston Yancey

    This year, I’m fasting from all flesh meat, except for Sundays and the Annunciation. I’ll be giving up caffeine for all the days. Most difficult, but after a great deal of discussion and prayer with my spiritual director and others much more advanced in the Faith than I, I am obeying a prompting in my heart that God burdened me with last September to forgo receiving the Eucharist during Lent. I received for the last time this past Sunday and will not keep the feast again until Easter morning.

    But I’m picking up more this year than I did last, which I am only now truly understanding is the greater purpose of Lent. I’ll be practicing lectio divina. I’m also engaging a new form of personal reflection with God through writing and the Psalms. Essentially, it’s about centering myself increasingly upon Him in the everyday. His Presence in the everyday, specifically.

  • http://www.blessedisthekingdom.com Fr. Christian Mathis

    Wow Preston!

    That sounds like a quite a bit to bite off. I will pray that you will succeed where God wants you to succeed and get up each time you fail.

  • lee

    Great thoughts as always Fr. Being alone in a motel room (at a conference) gave me a lot of time to think tonight. My life is just too hectic and I want to remove the unessentials and focus more on my family, faith and friends. This will mean cutting back some of the work stuff, online and cable “entertainment”. I will make time each day to talk to each child and my wife individually about their day- not just a dinner conversation- and engage in some fun activity with each family member each day (checkers, basketball, etc). I will make it a point to pray each day for someone in need- and contact them. I will give up icky, fatty, sugary foods. I will stop cursing (again).

  • Ericka

    I am giving up all grains, legumes, and sugars this Lent, and switching to fish only on Wednesdays and Fridays. I will give at least an hour each Friday standing with others on Cherry St. in Knoxville, and I am working even more rigorously to remove seeds of pride, to replace them with humility.

  • http://www.blessedisthekingdom.com Fr. Christian Mathis

    That sounds like a quite a challenge for Lent. But as I like to say, better to aim high and fail, than to aim low and succeed. Even better would be to aim high and succeed!

    Good Luck!

  • http://www.blessedisthekingdom.com Fr. Christian Mathis

    Sounds great Ericka! I hope we can all pray for the success of one another!

  • http://twitter.com/prestonyancey Preston Yancey

    Thank you; I certainly appreciate the prayers. I’m also learning, and I think this may be the most important thing He’s getting me to understand at the start, to keep a loose grip on the practices, to truly birth the work first in my heart and then make the sacrifices (in keeping as best I can Psalm 51) and to let it be a flowing expression of faithfulness, not a systematized checklist.

  • Mary R

    I am giving up all liquid drinks, such as coffe, tea, milk etc, and only drink water. The addition to Lent is to be more responsive at the blogs I visit. I usually just read and move on to the next blog. The fasting is denial and control of the flesh. The blog-response is a reaching out to the larger internet community.

  • http://www.blessedisthekingdom.com Fr. Christian Mathis

    Funny, as I am trying to spend less time on blogs for Lent.

  • Mary R

    O, but you have a blog. You reach out and inform, sometimes teach people. On occasion, you will get a response you can reply to – more communication.
    I, on the other hand just read. I treat the internet like a big book of information. It does not require me to respond. I am an observer. I am trying to be more personal, to care about what I read and treat the blogger/writer as a person. I, in other words, I am trying to bring a human aspect to my blog reading by being more social.
    Sincerely,
    Mary R

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