Tomorrow marks the first day of lent, and although I admit, lent is something I have done ZERO research on, I beleive that taking time to prepare our hearts through discipline, ritual and sacrifice for Easter is extremely relevant and important. Christmas, we can get-away with, forgetting the meaning and making it about family or giving or any of those other things...because we still have Easter coming! But Easter, Easter is the reason for everything! Not just the reason for the season... Easter is why we are alive! It's the very core of our beliefs and the cause of wars all over our planet today... Easter is worth fighting for. Easter is worth sacrifice and discipline.
I haven't actually decided what to do yet for lent... To be honest, I had forgotten about it until I saw a friend's Facebook post about what she was doing!
There are lots of angles to Lent... Sacrificing something hard to give up, reading a devotional or a certain amount of scripture each day, deprivation of the body (such as cutting out an essential food group as a form of fasting and dieing to self)... Then there's the gaining angle... Increasing yourself. Researching daily, running or excerciZe or juicing or any number of "New Years resolution" type lent activities. These are all excellent things, so long as they bring you closer to God in the end, and help you celebrate Christ, not self.
This is the tricky part for me these days. Being pregnant means two things for my faith. 1) no Ritalin 2) baby brain... Seriously this is like the perfect storm for stupidity and distractability. I swear my IQ is half of what it would have been 6-7 years ago in bible college... so I need to think this through on paper (to stay focused) and I need to decide something that is next-to-impossible to dis-connect from God.
So I started my list of possible ideas... Intercession, bible reading, prayer journaling, encouragement notes... But my mind was like "it's not hard enough!" But without a proper commitment, they are ALLtoo hard... I reminisced back to highschool when our whole youth group participated in a study called "the hardest 30 days of your life" by justin lookadoo, which ended with a spiritual retreat.
I did some math, and it totally works for lent, since it is a devotional where you do 5 days a week, which evens out to complete the 46 days of lent. It also leaves me a day or two to recoup and focus all that hard work into Easter weekend.
This is a neat devotional in that it's set up like an "I dare you to attempt this" with a challenge in each devotion, that (group mentality) MUST be completed. There's a 21 day media fast, a certain style of daily prayer, a give-away of a favorite object... And many more.
Needless to say, it will be difficult but will keep me focused! I am excited to see what can happen in my faith with a little intentional discipline.
