We all see many advertisements which state that they can help people become a new person in a short time; it might be weight loss, improved skills in some area, or even a new look! Many people try such programs only to find that true change is not as quick and easy as advertised. Change usually comes only after a person has made a conscious decision to become a new person. Change also takes time.
Lent offers a time to identify areas in our life to grow to be a more spiritually, emotionally, and physically healthy person. It is a time to shed old habits, attitudes, and areas of sinfulness, so that Easter may find us a truly renewed person.
As each of us grows older and has new and different experiences, we also need to continue to deepen our faith life, to meet our changing life experience. Lent provides that setting.
Lent is also a good time to invite someone who has not been practicing their faith in recent years to return as we focus on ways to become more healthy in our lives.
May this Lent be a time to become a new you!
40 Ways to Keep Lent
1. Right a wrong.
2. Keep a promise.
3. Count your blessings.
4. Mend a quarrel.
5. Spread Joy.
6. Attend Mass more frequently.
7. Fast from gossip.
8. Be humble in success, patient in hardship, hopeful in disappointment, generous in prosperity.
9. Fill a box with outgrown clothes, toys, etc., to donate to a charity or a needy family.
10.Offer approval to others.
11.Visit a person in a nursing home or a homebound person.
12.Reflect upon your problems as challenges, your challenges as blessings.
13.Encourage an enemy.
14.Seek Peace.
15.Pray the Way of the Cross.
16.Apologize to another if you are wrong.
17.Think first of someone else.
18.Visit neighbors.
19.Invite someone who doesn’t attend church to join you in attending.
20.Give Alms to the poor and needy.
21.Laugh a little. Laugh a little more.
22.Receive the Sacrament of Reconciliation during Lent.
23.Say “ Thanks! ” Mean it.
24.Read the Bible.
25.Offer a compliment.
26.Pray the Rosary as a family.
27.Conserve your use of natural resources (e.g. water) as a form of stewardship.
28.Rejoice in the beauty and wonder of Earth.
29.Inspire hope in another.
30.Be hopeful yourself.
31.Plan to plant a tree.
32.Send financial support to a just cause or people in need.
33.Gladden the heart of a child.
34.Make a new friend.
35.Renew an old friendship.
36.Take time to imagine.
37.Do a job for nothing.
38.Plan as a family ways to minimize the electricity you use for a day.
39.Abstain from complaining.
40.On Good Friday spend an hour alone; read Psalm 22.