Life-teen update (03-04-2007)

As we enter into this second week of Lent many of you may be experiencing some minor difficulties with your Lenten penance. For those of you who are not, I am extremely jealous and wish that I had your strength. I, on the other hand am having all kinds of difficulties. One of the things that I am doing involves fasting for the poor souls in Purgatory. Now I have never been very good at fasting and am reminded of this fact every time I step onto a scale. I like my greasy tasty food just as much as the next man, and when it comes to potatoes probably more. But I am diverging from the point. The point is that my stomach, in an uncontrollable fit of hunger, declared war on my small intestine and tried to devour it. Luckily I have a strong small intestine and with the help of its larger brother and some extra supplies sent in by the spleen, it was able to repel the ravenous advances of my stomach. If that was just a little to graphic for you than I apologize. Maybe the real point of this has nothing to do with the interior struggle of my digestive tract, but rather that Lent is already presenting me with challenges and the rest of the forty days looks to be rather challenging, and some might even say down right hard. For those of you who are like me and are finding Lent to be hard I want to quote Tom Hanks from A League of Their Own. He is asking one of the players on his baseball team why she is quitting and she tells him that it was just too hard. He responds and tells her, “It’s supposed to be hard. It’s the hard that makes it good. If it was easy everyone would do it.” I find an odd sort of comfort in this particular quote, and not just during Lent. It’s the hard that makes it good. If it were easy everyone would do it. In more than just Lent this applies to our entire Catholic way of life. Why was it in John 6 that so many of Christ’s followers left him after he tells them that unless they eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood they will not have life within them? Because the teaching was to hard. Many Christians today still cannot accept Christ’s gift of the Eucharist because it is a teaching that is to hard. But it is true none the less. So as Lent progresses on I encourage you to join me in turning to the Lord when you are weak and to depend on his strength to get you through. It is the hard that makes it good. If it were easy everyone would do it.