How Did Your Lent Go?

How did your Lent go? Mine wasn’t exactly as planned. If you followed your Lenten resolutions to a T, that’s awesome – and now you have the Easter season to celebrate; if you didn’t, that’s ok—you now have the Easter season to celebrate! God is ever present in our lives, and however the past several weeks went, Christ has risen! The Easter season is one for everyone to celebrate, no matter our sins or where we’re at in life. Ideally, we prepared for Jesus’ resurrection during Lent, grew closer to Him, and can now fully rejoice! But for our family members who don’t take Lent seriously, our “Chreaster” friends who only attend Mass on Christmas and Easter, our coworkers who aren’t sure what they believe, Christ’s resurrection and the celebration thereof is for them, too.

I was reflecting on how to make the most of the Easter season, as we are called to celebrate all 50 days! It doesn’t sound too hard, right? Who can’t celebrate every day? But for me, it can be easy to fall back into familiar routines and forget to “celebrate,” forget that everything has changed with Christ’s resurrection. We are a new people with renewed hope that our lives on earth are in fact our “exile” (see Hail, Holy Queen prayer), and after running the race, we may live forever with the Lord. This is only possible because Jesus died for our sins and rose from the dead. Every Christian has heard this countless times. But this is the reason we are called to not slip back into routines or settle for mediocrity. I love that the church constantly calls us to conversion and urges us to draw closer and closer to God. The different liturgical seasons and their patterns help us do so.  Lent is definitely a time of self-reflection and sacrifice to prepare us for Easter; however, Easter is not the time to sit back and settle and take for granted the resurrection. I believe it is a time to pray and live anew in hope and joy, bask in the love of Jesus, and let this love permeate our lives.

For me, for this to happen, I need to be intentional about my Easter celebrations. I’m finding new ways to keep prayer at the center of my day and am often lifting my heart to the Lord with shouts of “He is risen!” I’m also trying to focus on sharing the joy of the resurrection with those around me—those friends, family and coworkers I mentioned earlier.  If I’m so excited about Jesus rising from the dead and what that means to me, I want to share that with others! We can support each other, too, by often proclaiming the truth: Christ is risen! He is risen, indeed!