My Lenten Reflection

"You may be the only Bible that some people ever read." ~ Unknown

Well folks, it's Ash Wednesday, which marks the beginning of Lent for Christians. Because I realized yesterday in talking to one of my friends that not all churches celebrate Lent, I thought I'd give some quick background.

Lent is the 40 days (not counting Sundays) leading up to Easter Sunday. It is a time of reflection, self-examination, prayer and preparation of our hearts for celebrating Easter. Each year, I do the classic giving something up as a form of pennance of sorts (this year is sweets), but I also try and focus and reflect on some aspect of my faith. This year, I thought I'd share some of that reflection with you.
My focus this Lenten season is pretty simple: how I act is important. In fact, how we act is more important than where we are sitting on Sunday mornings if you ask me. If we claim to be Christians, yet we do not act that way and we treat people poorly, we have missed the enitre point.

I recently stumbled upon a couple of wonderful quotes that convinced me that this should be my focus for Lent (and hopefully beyond the next 40 days). I tend to figure if I keep reading the same thing repeatedly in my daily life, I should probably pay attention!

St. Francis of Asissi instructed Christians to, "Preach the gospel at all times. If necessary, use words."

Rabbi Albert Lewis, upon whom the amazing book "Have a Little Faith" is based said, "Faith is about doing. You are how you act, not just how you believe."

Wow....according to St. Francis and Rabbi Lewis, our first method of preaching the gospel and showing our faith should be our actions. We should only use words if they are necessary after that. The idea being that our actions should be clear enough to show our faith to people without a word being uttered. If we live our lives in this manner, then no words will need to be spoken.

I think it's easy to sit in the pew and say the right things on command, but I think that the most important part of our faith is putting it into action. Faith is showing people in our every day lives the kindness, forgiveness, and mercy that we profess to have. This is something that I know that I need to work on in my own life.

So, for the next 40 days I will be focusing on this idea of really living out my faith (and probably craving a lot of chocolate chip cookies!). Hopefully taking the time to do this will make a difference in the way I approach life in general.