About Me

My photo
This blog is simply meant to bring God the glory; no more and no less. I'd love to hear from you! Comments, questions, conversation. rebecca.labriola@gmail.com

Thursday, February 14, 2013

Lent, Life, and Your Soul. Thursday, February 14. Lent 2013.

So, Lent has begun.
I absolutely LOVE the Lenten season.
It is definitely my favorite liturgical season.
There is so much room for growth in faith and relationship with Christ.
There is something incredible about sharing in the experience of Christ’s time of preparation before His death.
The incredible thing about Lent is that it is not a perpetually depressing or solemn time.
We know that this time of preparation is not perpetual because
we have this incredible hope in Christ.
We know that after this preparation time,
Christ offers His life as a sacrifice so that all the sinful might have life within Him.
And we know that along with this amazing gift of eternal life Christ rises again.

Lent is like rereading your favorite book over and over again.
You KNOW the ending.
You KNOW the hero will save the day.
And you KNOW in the end, good will overcome evil.
Yet, you still read that book over and over.

That’s kind of what Lent is like.
But a trillion times better because
it is the greatest story of love
and action
and good triumphing over evil
that has ever been written.
Ever.
Super cool.

So, we have this hope.
Today at mass the responsorial psalm was,
“Blessed are they who hope in the Lord.”
He wants us to have a strong and firm hope in Him.
Hope through Lent,
through the struggles,
through the pain,
through the joys,
through the triumphs,
through life.

Life.
It’s something that Jesus supports.
He is behind the whole idea.
After all, He is the one who blesses us with the gift of eternal life.
I found the first reading and the gospel interesting today.
I found them to be so related,
so correlated,
so intertwined.
Maybe they aren’t related at all but this is how they stuck out to me.

The first reading from Deuteronomy closes with this important line,
“Choose life, then, that you and your descendents may live.”
The Gospel reading was from Luke. It reads,
“What profit is there for one to gain the whole world yet lose or forfeit himself?”

I guess the connection for me lies here:
If you want to be a part of this world, wholly part of this world,
you must accept the rules of the world.
You must go with the flow.
You must be politically correct.
You must not offend anyone.
You must not challenge anyone.
You must believe that abortion is okay,
because the media and science say that
that beautiful life is just a blob of cells.
Then you would be able to gain the world.
Wholly and fully.
The world will be yours.

But if we choose the world, we risk losing our souls.
If we choose life,
we will be speaking for the precious unborn,
we will be supporting life from natural conception to natural death,
we will be supporting all life,
and we will not be gaining this world, but we will not be losing our souls.

Well, that is how those scriptures worked out in my mind.
Maybe it’s crazy or maybe it makes sense.
Please let me know what you think!
Agree, disagree, discussion.

I pray that this Lenten season may be a time
of closeness to Christ,
of hope,
of sacrifice,
and of life.