1. BE FISCALLY RESPONSIBLE. Learn to save 10% or more of your income. Plan for the future: retirement, health issues, educational needs. Focus on experiences with those you love and not accumulating more things. Get out of debt. Debt is not good for individuals or governments.

2. BE A GOOD CITIZEN. Pay your taxes. While it is good and right to use all legitimate deductions, do not seek to find spurious loopholes. If we as citizens don’t pay for the services we expect, we have no right to them. Vote. If you don’t like the ways things are happening in government, work constructively with others to change it.

3. GET HEALTHY. This includes eating nutritiously and appropriate amounts, exercising regularly, not smoking or using recreational drugs, abusing alcohol or prescription drugs, and having a good attitude. Have friends, be connected to your neighbors, to your family, to a faith community or larger organization that challenges you to be your best. Don’t expect “the system” to take care of you if you haven’t taken care of yourself first.

4. BECOME EDUCATED. Go to school for as long as you can. When you are finished with your formal education or technical training, continue to read. Limit TV and Internet time. Strengthen your mind by learning new things, traveling as you are able, embracing new people, foods, and ideas.

5. WORK. The world does not owe you a living. If you are able-bodied and on welfare, seek vocational training and get a job. You were born to contribute in creative ways. If you have a job, do it honestly and with integrity, in a balanced and sustainable fashion.

6. VOLUNTEER. We need to remember John F. Kennedy’s famous line, “Ask not what your country can do for you but ask what you can do for your country.” Find a way to give monetarily and/or time-wise to causes and people that inspire you and need your help.

7. PROTECT THE ENVIRONMENT. Polluting out water, soil, and air will only come back to harm us. It already is. Plant a garden, even if it is in a pot in a window sill. Don’t litter. Recycle. Don’t waste water. Don’t drive your car unnecessarily; take public transportation or walk or bike (see #3).

8. BUY LOCAL AND AMERICAN MADE.  When possible, get your food from a source under 100 miles away from your home. Support local businesses and American-made products when you can.

9. PROTECT THE NEXT GENERATION. Children are the future. They need to be protected and cared for. Speak out against abuse and domestic violence. Find ways to help a child in need in your neighborhood.

10. WORSHIP SOMETHING BIGGER THAN YOURSELF. Whether you are religious or not, find something bigger than you are and commit to its guiding principles. Join with like-minded people and challenge each other to be the best possible version of who each of you are. Live in such a way that the fruit of your life will continue after your death. Make each moment count.

I offer these as a way to get this country back on its feet and moving forward in a positive direction again.

Welcoming the stranger. I hear that and instantly think of inviting people over, opening the door to angels. Those are good and important things to do. However, as we come through Lent into Easter, a seven week season of rejoicing in Christ’s defeat of the most dreaded stranger ever, death, I have learned that I am a stranger to myself in so many ways.

What is it like to welcome myself? Many writers, past and present, talk about the dark recesses of the soul where things reside that are hard for a life-long Christ-follower to admit are there. Anger, jealousy, rage, envy, greed, gluttony, vainglory, pride: a veritable laundry list of sins reside deep in my soul. I try very hard not to get to know those foul residents, to keep them as strangers. They are forgiven and cleansed in the blood of the Lamb, I remind myself; therefore, I do not have to have anything to do with them, like a bad neighbor, I can justify ignoring. Or the old ostrich idea that if I put my head in the sand, then maybe all that gunk really isn’t there.

Not.

I am learning slowly—oh so slowly—that I need to embrace these foul residents of my interior life. Like Mother Teresa scooping desperation out of the gutters of Calcutta, I need to invite these wretched aspects of myself in. I need to face them, ask them who they are and where they come from. I need to hear from them what there is to learn from their presence in my life.

For example, anger was such a necessary protector in childhood. It kept me from greater evil. Yet, I am no longer a child. Just as I no longer get out the Barbie dolls which are still in the closet, I don’t need to get my anger out to use as a weapon of defense any more.

Or greed. I needed to hang on to material things because I was trying to hang on to myself. Inviting greed in to chat helps me see the depth of my pain and the wound that needs help and healing. I learn that Jesus is holding on to me; I don’t have to try to do it all by myself.

As I learn to welcome these dark elements in my soul, I find that I am also more able to welcome Jesus and his love, something that has been a stranger to me in functional ways. In the welcoming of Jesus’ love, I become less of a stranger to myself. I walk through each day more at peace internally and externally, more at home in my own essential being, and therefore able to be more welcoming to others.

This year, I tried to listen even more carefully to what God was calling me to for 40 days. I got out my new project pad from Staples and wrote: Prayer, Fasting, and Almsgiving on the left side. This was going to be an official spiritual project! I was going to get it right this time. Across from the subheadings, the three disciplines of Lent, I listed one or two things to do or not do. Joy and gratitude were going to mark my time. This year, I was going to balance giving up with adding in.

Well, here we are deep into Lent and all hell has broken loose. That is one of those few sayings that always seemed like swearing to me and, yet, I have come to realize is very theologically accurate. Hell breaks loose. Relationships, work projects, health and finances, every aspect of our life becomes susceptible to temptation from the lying master of hell, Satan.

Studying the spiritual disciplines and the writings of the Desert Fathers and Mothers led me to believe that any time the going was really tough, the Dark Night of the Soul was happening. The Dark Night is when we feel closest to Jesus’ cry from the cross, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” It has even become popular to comfort struggling friends with Dark Night of the Soul noises and pats on the back. But I have come to learn that this Dark Night (a “done in secret” cleansing) is happening in all Christ-followers all of the time. It is simply and profoundly that deep work God is always doing in our souls. At times, that deep work floats to the surface of our awareness, bringing a sense of heaviness and spiritual dryness. It is like being aware of muscles we didn’t know we had after a particularly strenuous day of yard work. Those muscles have always been there and we do use them, just not at that depth.

This Lent, God has showed me that the Dark Night of the Soul is really what mature Christians experience. Me? I am fighting acedia, one of the seven deadly sins, that means sloth or laziness. This is not the laziness that reminds one of a long summer afternoon in a hammock or a mild procrastination regarding cleaning the bathroom. This is the prideful rebellion that says to God, in pouting tones, I don’t want to struggle for Christ-likeness. (Cue: stamping foot.) This hard time is the hand of God on a rebellious spirit. While it is the loving hand of a parent on a child in a full-blown temper tantrum, it has only served to ramp up my tantrum, not soothe it.

All hell has broken loose and I am tired of it, stamping my foot at God, pouting that I am not on a smooth and charmed path of “victorious Christian living.” I want to follow Christ, but as sheep follow a Good Shepherd, not as a fellow cross-hanger. I do not want to make the effort to truly turn over to God my pride, my sinful passions, my desire to have it my way. I want to carry my cross on a gold chain.

Acedia does not sound as romantic as the Dark Night of the Soul. Being called spiritually lazy does not make me feel good about myself. My project list for Lent was actually a form of acedia, things to do to make me feel virtuous, as I was too slothful to tackle the bigger sins of pride, arrogance, and narcissistic tendencies.

Yet, there is hope. I am reminded of the sermon by St. John Chrysostom (347-407) preached in every Orthodox Church at Easter. He reminds all of us that everything is from a loving God always at work in us: Conscientious and lazy, celebrate the day! You who have kept the fast, and you who have not, rejoice, this day, for the table is bountifully spread!

Amen. Come, Lord Jesus, come.

Follow the tour— While there are only a couple more to post on the tour, here is where we have been if you want to go back and read ones you missed.

February 20^th

Rachel Stone: http://eatwithjoy.org/2012/02/20/lenten-fasting-easter-feasting/

February 27^th

Margot Starbuck: http://margotstarbuck.blogspot.com/2012/02/being-formed-in-grocery-checkout-line.html

March 5^th

Brent Bill: http://holyordinary.blogspot.com/2012/03/time-is-fulfilled-lenten-meditation.html

March 12^th

Logan Mehl-Laituri: http://feraltheology.wordpress.com/2012/03/10/maximilian-tebessa-lenten-abstinence/

March 19^th

Andrew Byers: http://abyers.wordpress.com/2012/03/19/when-salvation-hurts/

March 26^th

Valerie Hess: http://www.valeriehess.com/generalnews/spiritual-warfare-or-spiritual-laziness

April 2^nd

Beth Booram: http://peregrinejourney.blogspot.com

April 6^th; Good Friday

Chad Young: www.findingauthenticchristianity.com

Breathe deeply in Christ today. Feel your soul expand with your lungs. If that is not happening, ask God to show you why.

I will be doing a workshop at this conference. It promises to be a wonderful event. Come if you can!

In Lent, we remember that Christians are not born, they are made, and the human heart must be forged on the anvil of encounter with the living God.  “You have set me in a fire,” says an old prayer, “you have set me in a fire of Love.”  Lent is the season of freedom that shows us the best way of all to live both our Christian lives, and our day-to-day lives as women and men who hope to make a difference…Technically, fasting is going without food, while abstinence is going without certain foods, like meat.  There are many ways to make this disciple a part of your intentional practice of the spiritual life, and they go beyond the conventional “giving up chocolate!”  

Ash Wednesday is February 22nd this year. Sunday, February 19th, is the last Sunday the Church says “Alleluia” until the Easter Vigil (April 7th at sundown). Be thinking about where you are now and where you want to be on April 8th. Choose a practice to do in prayer, in fasting, and in almsgiving, the traditional foci of Lent

For example, in prayer, you may commit to saying the Lord’s Prayer each day at 9 AM, noon, and 3 PM. For fasting, you may choose to spend one lunch hour a week without eating, instead reading the Bible or a devotional book. For almsgiving, you might choose an organization to send the money to that you would have spent on lunch that day.

The important thing is that you do something, with intention and with the idea of opening yourself up to God so that God can do a deeper transforming work in you. Write down your intentions in each area; consider telling  a friend, who can help hold you accountable. Seek to be different in your walk with God by paying attention to the leading of the Holy Spirit. Then, during the next 6 weeks, walk with holy expectancy, seeking to find God in unexpected places in your life and in the world.