Lenten Reflections: Week 1

This is the first in a series of Lenten Reflections I want to share with you.

Christian writers classically considered four things people seek to make them happy. They are first, the pursuit of money for its own sake. Second, is the desire for power over those around you. It is controlling or manipulating others. Third, is emphasizing pleasure in life, typically we think of this as sex, drugs or alcohol, but it included overindulging in food or sleep or what we would call “lazying around.”  Fourth is seeking fame or prestige. It is making sure no one says anything bad about you but, also, fame seeking, think here of tiktok videos or counting how many “likes” you get on a post.  One or more of these four things, money, power, pleasure, prestige, will wreck your spiritual life if they are pursued for the purpose of making you happy. 

The antidote has always been to seek meaning in life, not happiness for happiness’s sake.  Those four things are passing things which cannot satisfy a human being. We are just plainly made for something more because we are made by God in his image.  Living a more meaningful life is often more difficult, you actually have to think about it.  At its very core it involves speaking and acting in truth motivated by love in order to bring order and goodness out of the chaos of sin.  This is what Christ does.  He speaks and acts in truth motivated by love of God and neighbor to bring hope and healing to those around him.

Each day God gives us the opportunity to look around us, in our everyday life, and speak and act in truth motivated by love to bring good out of sin and disorder.  This might seem like a really tall order, but it begins small. It is why during lent we are supposed to go to the desert, a place with few distractions and think about our own life.  

Do you look about and see what needs to be done and then speak and act out of love to bring about good from chaos? In other words, do you live a meaningful life? The path toward a meaningful life at all times begins with an honest assessment of our own life in the here and now. 

I’ll end with this idea.  What if a whole lot of us stopped chasing money, power, pleasure, and fame for their own sake and started living in truth to bring about good and did this motivated by love of God, love of self, and love of neighbor?