Getting Ready for Lent - Part 1

Has anyone out there started to prepare for Lent? It soon coming upon us, wouldn't it be great to make this the best Lenten Season of our lives? I am praying that God will send forth many Graces this year. I want to be transformed, and for my family to have a deeper desire to be close to God, as well as the desire to love and serve others.

Lent is a forty day period which is marked by fasting, both from foods as well as festivities, and by doing other acts of penance. The three traditional practices to be taken up during the season of Lent are prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. Usually, people break the fast on Sundays (the day of the resurrection).

Every year, I try to get a new book on the life of a Saint for each member of my family to read during the season of reflection. There also some wonder books written specially to read during the Season of Lent.

I encourage you to begin thinking about the Season of Lent. Things that bear consideration, what will you be eating (or not eating)?, what will your prayer life be like, what will you be reading, what about almsgiving, or your service to others? Let's make this Lenten Season indeed a very special one, one in which we will be blessed by many graces. Let's rise above just giving up candy for 40 days, and make is truly a season of repentance. I have a great quote regarding detachment to the world and love and service to others:

Faith and love which are gifts of the Holy Spirit are such great and powerful means that a person who has them can easily, and with joy and consolation, go the way Jesus Christ went. Besides this, the Holy Spirit gives man the power to resist the delusions of the world so that although he makes use of earthly good, yet he uses them as a temporary visitor, without attaching his heart to them. But a man who has not got the Holy Spirit, despite all his learning and prudence, is always more or less a slave and worshipper of the world.

St. Innocent of Irkutsk, Indication of the Way into the Kingdom of Heaven.