Journey of a Soul

          Sometimes, the most obvious things don’t come to us till they’re taken to God.

          With Lent approaching, I wondered what God had in store for me, what He wanted of me this year. Pretty soon something became clear: on the personal front, it was to be a time of care. To sleep more, move more, rest more, read more. And to watch what I ate and when I ate. Basically, all the parts of my life that had been neglected for so long. As I pondered His will for me, it struck me that this seemed a rather different Lent because of this focus on the care of the physical self, rather than of deprivation.

          But a few days later, one night after Rosary, Our Lady made it very clear to me. Lent was about bringing sin into the Light. It was a time of taking to Jesus our falls and our wounds so that He may touch them and heal each one. All the bits of me that God had tapped – the sleep, the withdrawing from the world to rest, the eating, the exercise, the books waiting to be read – were all the ways in which I had fallen away from Him over the past years. While I had begun to reclaim some back for the Lord, I still had a ways to go before I crested the hill.

          Something so obvious and known, yet as usual, lost to me till now.

          But my heart was still searching for a final piece. At Mass this week, in a quiet church after a joyful wind~merry day, I traced the Sign of the Cross over both my ears and asked God to lay His voice and His Lenten will upon my ears. I knew by now what I needed to do but I sensed something was still missing from my understanding.

          Thus, imagine my surprise to hear the Gospel reading for the 6th Sunday in Ordinary Time,

A leper came to Jesus and kneeling down begged him and said,

“If you wish, you can make me clean.”

~  Mark 1: 40

         The leper did not sit waiting for Jesus to come to him. The leper went to Jesus.

          The leper did not stand in pride, all knowing. He knelt down, at last parted from the ways of the world, facing his sin squarely, no excuses he made for it.

          The leper did not wait to see if God would heal him. He asked – begged – to be healed.

From the depths of his soul, the leper had cried out to be freed.

          With that, I suddenly understood anew,

Lent is a journey of a soul back to God.