“…LENT IS HARD!  Denying yourself and trying to live a life like Christ…is HARD!  A wise monk recently told me something that I pray rings true for everyone here this morning.  He said:  “I never understand why they call it “Great Lent”, because I have never met a sincere Orthodox Christian who has ever had a “Great” Lent.”

On Saturday, March 23rd, the Pan Orthodox Community of Genesee County gathered together at St. Mary Magdalene for a Lenten Retreat, led by Abbot Archimandrite Sergius of St. Tikhon’s Monastery in South Canaan, Pennsylvania. The retreat topic was “Acquiring the Mind of Christ”, speaking about the importance of prayer in the spiritual lives of the Christian Faithful.

…Great Lent is our calling back from the enslavement of our passions…our wants…our desires.  It is about purging ALL of those things that lead us to forget WHO we are…WHAT we were meant to do…and WHERE we are called to be…

One way to measure whether we will be with the sheep or the goats on the final judgement day is to honestly ask ourselves this simple question: During my lifetime, what did I do to Jesus?

One of the most wonderful parts of Great Lent (besides the incredible worship services) is the systematic destruction of the “mine mentality”.  The Church, guided by the Holy Spirit, calls for us to spend 40+ days rooting out all of those things in our lives that cause us to turn our back on the Fatherly Embrace of God.  During Lent, we deny ourselves worldly pleasures (MY entertainment).  We limit the types and amounts of food that we eat (MY cravings).  We increase the amount of prayers and services that we attend (MY time).  We do all of these things so that we as God’s children can remember the reliance that we once had on our Father.  The more devotion we have to this Holy Period, the more we stop learning to say “Mine”…and start remembering that we are “His”.