Today is Ash Wednesday, Lent has officially started. As I attended Liturgy of the Word this afternoon, the message I heard was nothing short of what I needed to hear. Growing up in the Catholic church, you are taught to “give up” something for lent as our way of “suffering as Jesus did in the desert”. Well as adults, we could give up senseless shopping or bread or some other guilty pleasure we constantly indulge in. The homily given today expressed that we should not just “give up” something but look to change our lives for the better — “40 days of positive change“. Instead of being negative, critical and mean, we should look to be positive, be less critical and give of ourselves (volunteering). To step outside of our comfort zone and take small steps to changing our way of life for the better.
Whether or not you’re Catholic, or even religious for that matter, I’m sure we all have something within ourselves that we can work on to make ourselves better. This message was in keeping with my theme of “change”, that until I started writing this paragraph I didn’t realize was a major theme in my posts for this year. I wanted to start 24 on the right foot and 2 weeks after I’ve been given this message that seems sooooooo fitting for me right now. It’s not just a time to change the physical stuff but the bad habits and mentality that are often so hard to work on. We need to be more forgiving, less selfish and more patient. With all of the technology we have now, it’s hard to imagine how we used to deal before it all. We’ve become “instant” people forgetting that waiting sometimes is part of life and can help us to take a moment to look at what is going on instead of getting lost in why we haven’t gotten what we we’re waiting for yet.
So if you need a new challenge in life, try changing something within yourself. We all have bad habits we’d like to kick, maybe now is the time for you to give it a try.
Becoming a better person has never killed anyone…
Just a Dash 