It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year

For some reason, I LOVE Lent.  I know that it is supposed to be a time of sacrifice (and it is) but I can't help but get really excited about this entire time leading up to Easter, remembering daily that Christ suffered to bring us back in union with God.  That is the ultimate love story.

Every Lent, I struggle with what to give up.  The idea behind giving something up is to experience some sort of sacrifice daily.  Can we do anything that will be equally to the sacrifice Christ made for us?  Absolutely not.  Can we remind ourselves daily of the sacrifice He made for us?  Yes.  I agree 100% with that sentiment, but I know that it is also way too easy for me to fall into the "I'll give up candy for Jesus but really it's because I overloaded on Mardi Gras and feel sick" trap.  Instead, I like to focus on DOING something.  Last year, I did something nice for someone every day of Lent.  This year, in keeping with my overall goal of praying more, I created a prayer chain.  It is one of those old-school construction paper chains because I love doing crafts.  On each strip of paper, I wrote a prayer intention.  The idea behind it is, every day, I open one of the links at the end and that is my prayer challenge for the day.  Some of them were really simple like "pray for _____."  Some of them are harder challenges, like go to Eucharistic Adoration.  Some even surprised me as I was writing them...people's names just showed up on the paper and I realized, wow I really do need to pray for them even though it will be hard because they have hurt me.  I also learned that I am not the brightest and managed to write down vocations twice and missionaries at least three times.

By challenging my prayer life daily, I hope to deepen my relationship with Christ and also with those around me.  I am a much nicer person when my prayer life is in order, and I struggle with that when I am stressed.  Plus, I just really like surprises and luckily I forgot most of the ones I wrote down :)

In other news:  I bought a missal.  After terrifying my father with saying I was going to bring it to church, I convinced him it was a missAL not a missILE.