Lenten Reminders

"Lent isn't about senseless sacrifices; it's about meaningful ones. It's not a season for offering endless prayers, it's a time for offering honest ones. It's a season to come back to the Lord who calls us to return to Him. Try to see the Lord in the sacrifices you make. Make Lent a time when you learn to RECOGNIZE Jesus Christ and the thanksgiving that we owe Him for everything."


To keep our lenten focus, as often there are attacks when we step-up our spirituality, I remember something I wrote last lent after failure.

Twelve Steps to recommiting after falling off the Lenten wagon

1. Admit we are powerless —that our lives have become unmanageable. - Act of Humility

2. Believe that the Holy Spirit can restore us to sanity. - Come Holy Spirit

3. Decide to turn our will and our lives over to the care of Jesus thru Mary - Daily Consecration/Morning Offering

4. Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. - Marian examination of conscience

5. Admit to God, to ourselves, and to a Priest the exact nature of our wrongs. - Confession

6. Become entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character. - Act of Contrition

7. Humble ourselves, ask Him to remove our shortcomings.

8. Restitution. Do good and ask forgiveness of those we've hurt.

9. Call on the intercession of the Saints! ~ Litany

10. Continue to take personal inventory and when we are wrong promptly admit it. - Nightly Examination

11. Seek through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out. - The Lord's Prayer

12. Work toward a spiritual awakening/deeper conversion as the result of these steps, practicing these principles and recommiting every time I fall off the wagon.

God bless us all as we enter into this most holy of seasons.