First Sunday of Lent

Making God #1 in Our Lives

Turn our hearts around! Lent provides the universal church and each of us a good time for self-reflection and practices that lead to a change of heart, true conversion. In this week’s readings, we are reminded that soon after Jesus’ baptism, he went to the desert where he was tempted. And he resisted!  When you read the Gospel, or hear it proclaimed this weekend, pay close attention to the way Jesus responds to the devil, to the temptation to put self before God. How often do we do that?

Is God first in our lives? Above all else? What evidence do we have for that?

This Sunday we celebrate the Rite of Sending and the Rite of Election with our catechumens and candidates. Our adults, teens and children have been discerning their calls to conversion, to radical change in their hearts. Perhaps the questions they are reflecting on will spur us to return to making God #1 in our lives.

• What concrete evidence in your life demonstrates that you have listened to Go’s word and have been formed and transformed by it?
• In what way have you patterned your life on Jesus’ life in the Gospels? How have you changed?
• What evidence in your life and in your actions demonstrates that you have taken the word of God out into your world?
• What evidence in your life demonstrates that you are incorporated into the life of prayer and worship of the Catholic community?