If you’re like me, you were looking forward to the beginning
of Great Lent as an opportunity to regain some control in your life both
physically and spiritually. With all life’s obligations and spiritual road
bumps, it is comforting (to me at least) that today is Clean Monday, a day of
strict fasting and prayer as the first day of Great Lent. It isn’t as if I can’t
do these things other days, but I need all the help I can get so I am thankful
for this season.
God has guided His Church into all truth through the power
and inspiration of the Holy Spirit. More and more I realize just much the Holy
Spirit has helped humanity over the centuries. Doctors ‘now’ tell new mothers
they should stay low with their newborns for six weeks (about 40 days). Doctors
‘now’ tell us that an occasional cleansing diet (strict fast) is good for our
bodies. These are just two examples of how the Holy Spirit guided the Church to
establish practices that also happened to be good for our bodies.
It shouldn’t surprise us since our bodies and our souls are
intimately connected. We are neither ‘just’ a body, nor ‘just’ a soul within a ‘shell’
we call the body. The body participates in our entire spiritual journey, from
the moment we are baptized into Christ until the moment we are buried. Without
our bodies we would have no way to repent from the sins that our bodies helped
to act out in the first place.
So consider the next seven weeks as an intense trip to the
gym, a body/soul gym, and allow the life of the Church to improve your physical
health AND help your soul grow closer to Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Have
a blessed Great Lent!
To help you along the way, I suggest a daily visit to Lent.GoArch.org
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