Lent is a Time to Pick a Side

BY: Fr. Nicholas Sheehy

What would happen if you lived the next forty days intensely for Christ?Lent is an important time and planning it out well is worth a shot.

Look back at the last forty days of your life. You can whip out your phone and check out your calendar, or you can take a few moments to think back and see your life over the course of the last forty days.

What have you done? How much have you lived for Jesus and how much have you lived for yourself?

Lent commemorates the forty days Jesus was fasting and praying in the desert. Who else was in the desert? The Devil was there. So this means that we can think of our living of Lent as basically time that we are accompanying Jesus or the Devil. We have to pick sides. Who are you going to choose?

Look back at the last forty days once again. How often have you picked Jesus and how often have you picked the Devil? Be honest, straightforward, even brutal with yourself. It’s okay. You probably have to admit that you have not been so perfect. Even if you like to identify yourself as a Christ-follower, you have probably had quite a few bumps on the road.

How do we know when we have chosen the Devil? This happens when we get our own way. It can be hard for us to take this head-on, as we have been trained by the culture to always try to get our own way. But this is precisely what the Devil is looking for. There are no chapels for adoration of the Devil, but what he really wants is for us to choose our own will over God’s will. For in this, we imitate his own mistaken decision.

If we look carefully at the past, we will see that it is often riddled by these bad and selfish decisions. We have often cut short our prayer time in order to mindlessly scroll through social media. We hit buttons to “like” posts on social media, but perhaps in our prayer there was no moment when we spiritually gave a “like” to the message God was leaving to us at that precise moment.

Read more at Catholic Exchange.