Since the First Sunday of Advent (November 27), we have been celebrating the

Christmas Cycle of the Church Year Calendar. The Soon we will begin the  on Ash Wednesday (February 22), is the season that prepares us to celebrate the victorious resurrection ofour Lord Jesus Christ.

May this Lenten Season, soon to come, be a blessing to us as we participate in worship, fellowship and service. May it help us realize the renewal of our lives in Jesus Christ. St. Paul said,  Christ, he is a new creation!” (2 Corinthians 5:17)

Author Woodrow Geier wrote about the Season of Lent: “Like other seasons of the Christian Year, Lent is a time when the church must teach the basic truths of the Christian faith, stressing in hymns, worship, preaching and service the reality that God is with us in Jesus Christ.

“Lent tells us that Christian life begins in ashes and ends in joy. Lent calls to memory our Lord’s fasting and temptation in the wilderness. We observe it as a time of self-discipline, penitence, prayer, meditation, and service. The experiences of Lent—our preparation in God’s time—are crowned by Easter Day, the day of Resurrection. Lent calls us to examine ourselves in the light of God’s Good News made known in the life, death and resurrection of Christ. It is a time for thinking about what God was doing with mankind when he sent Jesus to earth; a time for seeing what he is doing now by sending Jesus to all the highways of our daily life.

“Ecclesiastes tells us that there is ‘a time for every matter under heaven.’ We have a time to be born and a time to die, and in between, by God’s grace, a time to live nobly. So we are called to new seriousness, to renewal; every single incident of our life is enacted ‘under heaven’—under God’s time, another name for the love extended in Jesus Christ.”