Saturday, the first Week of Lent

   “Come, let us worship Christ the Lord, who for our sake endured temptation and suffering.”  Those who practice the Liturgy of the Hours may recognize this as the first Antiphon of the Invitatory for today.  Indeed, let us worship Christ who suffered for us.

   Of all the ways we can worship Jesus, Lent is the time to worship Him by our own offering of sacrifice and suffering.  How many of us really seek to sacrifice anything that might cause us to suffer?  Do we take the easy way out; the wide road rather than the narrow gate that leads to salvation?

   Jesus sacrificed His life for us.  He suffered greatly in order to open the door to Heaven that we might walk through.  Shouldn’t we try in some way to show that we also are willing to suffer for our sins and wrong-doings.  After all it was our sins that He died for.  Even though the physical death of Jesus was over two-thousand years ago, the sins He died for include those we have committed and those we will commit.

   Omnipresence is the term used to describe the fact that God is present yesterday, today and tomorrow.  It is a difficult concept for us to understand.  We are bound by time, God is not.  He sees every second of every hour of every day throughout eternity as one.  He knew the sins we would commit from the time we were formed in our mother’s womb.  Jesus came to forgive those sins just as much as the sins of those who lived during His time on earth.

   As we make our sacrifice for Lent and seek atonement for our sins, we must remember that God knows of all or our sins past, current, and future.  Let us ask Him to help us acknowledge the sacrifice of our Lord for those sins, confess them in our sorrow and strive to avoid sin in the future.

“But do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.” (2 Peter 3: 8).