Good morning and welcome to Lent. That sounds so depressing, but actually it's not. This is a wonderful time of introspection and examining ourselves and making sure that you are where you want to be as well as a chance to hone up some of those skills and techniques that will get you through your tough times.
Lent is that time that comes right before spring. It's February 25th this year (2009). Starting in the "dog days of winter," here we are bored to tears of cold weather and another cold front is coming through with dreams of warm lazy days totally lost in the snow and cloudy weather. All we want is a little warm weather and in comes another March ice storm! In my part of the country, our worst winter weather is usually in March, usually after we've received a taste of some warm weather.
Lent is a lot of things to different religions. My Catholic side of the family believes that giving something up for lent is a symbol of their faith. A favorite when I was growing up was chocolate or something fattening.
On the religious calendar, lent is that time that Jesus went into the wilderness and was tempted by the devil. He resisted and then started his ministry. So the temptations in the wilderness were a time of preparation of his ministry. That's the meaning that has grown through time to mean more of a time of discipline than anything else.
At my religious school, where the establishment realized they were leading a variety of denominations, they encouraged the student body to not only think of lent as a time of "giving up" something but to also think of a time of doing something extra. I particularly liked this idea. This is a time of discipline which can mean that you could decide to do something extra - like pick up my room and leave it neat every day; or add another hour of study to my schedule every day; or drink more water.
The point is that it is a time of discipline - whether that's giving up or doing something extra is up to you.
For our purposes here, you can use this "time of discipline" to do lots of things that will enhance your effectiveness like:
- Be more aware of problems, doubts sneaking into your daily life that can erode or destroy your belief and work to rid yourself of them
- Be disciplined and scheduled about your affirmations, meditations on a daily basis.
- Hone up your wish list, but examining the most important dreams you have. Ask yourself why you want this or why you want to be like this or why you want to be here or there. This is not to question whether they are true, this is to get more clear in your mind why they are so true, and therefore help you be more clear about your affirming and meditating processes.
- Add, refine, edit your vision board
- Do some journaling starting with your affirmations and just let
yourself wander with it and allow yourself to explore all your
affirmations. Try something like this:
I am a patient person. I enjoy being patient because it brings me great peace. Being patient allows me to have the peace I really enjoy. When I’m patient I’m easy and fun and so at one with God. Patience is a way for God to speak to me and for me a chance to listen to all that he has to say to me. He can tell me to go here, or do this or wait or not do that. I love being patient. It has taken me a long time to learn it, and I relish that I have finally become patient enough to enjoy the process. There are certain things I do to really practice my patience, and when I do them more often, patience is much easier for me. - Are there some areas that need a little tweaking?...wish list, vision board....
- Review a lot of the basic theories here and go through and see if any of your applications can use some updating.
You can use lent to give you a greater discipline that will make you a better person than you thought you could be.
This is the real purpose of lent, plus there's always a wonderful gift at the end: not only will you have spent this time disciplining yourself and getting better at all the techniques, there's....
Easter!
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