In the fourth episode of this series, Let’s Talk About Lent, we reflect on how Lent was never meant to be easy – and sometimes in our faith life, we can feel flat and everything just seems too difficult. When that happens, what should we do? In our next episode of “Let’s Talk About Lent”, Fr Will and Sr Theresa Maria get real about the difficulties of abstinence and how Lent challenges us to be more Christ-like.
Let’s Talk About Lent – Episode 4: What should we do when Lent gets hard? – is available here:
Let’s Talk About Lent – Episode 4: What should we do when Lent gets hard? – Transcript
Hey everyone I’m Fr Will. Hi, I’m Sr T here! And we’re here to talk to you guys about Lent! So Sister, what should we do when Lent gets hard? Giving up is not the answer Fr Will, so what should you do?
I think Lent is meant to be hard, and I think that’s probably the bottom line. Lent is always going to be a bit difficult because we’re used to having so many of these luxuries and pleasures within our lives and when you take one of those things away you’re kind of searching for that equilibrium and that balance in your life. But the point is that we kind of insert in that particular space Christ or something of Christ’s life within us. So that we can kind of journey on this pilgrimage of great change towards hopefully, our heavenly homeland.
Oh yes, and also Lent is meant to get hard so that we can turn toward God and seek for help. And we need a special grace, an impossible grace that Christ provide us only. Yeah. And also when Lent gets hard we need to remember the reason why we fast, the reason why we observe Lenten observation. Like fasting can be hard, but because we said Christ can do it, we can do it with Christ strength.
Yeah. I think there’s also these natural graces that flow from giving yourself over to things like fasting and giving something up or abstinence. I mean even if we look at the modern day science, they say that fasting helps the skin to grow radiant and keeps the skin glowing as you can tell from Sr T’s glowing face here. But it you know, it sparks this autophagy process, you know, where you detoxify, the cells are detoxified and they naturally come back to life. And so, even within our physiology like there’s this beautiful way of redeeming as we give up something for a particular thing.
And you will be surprised to see how much strength you can gain and how much you are capable of in giving up things for Lent.
So, when it gets hard, keep going and stick with Christ, you’ll get there.