You're listening to Catholic Sprouts, the daily podcast for Catholic kids that strives to plant seeds of faith.

Hey there, Sprouts. Today is Thursday, February 28, sprouts.

Today is Thursday, February 28th, 2019.

This week on the Catholic Sprouts podcast, we are preparing for Lent by talking about what it is and what we can anticipate experiencing during Lent.

We've already talked about the things that we can expect to see, including colors and ashes and veiled statues. Yesterday we talked about things we can anticipate

hearing, including the fact that we won't hear the Alleluia and that we should seek to find

more silence during the season of

Lent. Today, we are going to talk about things that we can expect to feel during Lent. And this is

where things get a little bit more challenging and a little bit more real. So there are three major things that you can expect to feel during Lent if you are

living the season well and are following the guidelines of Lent laid out for us by Jesus Christ

when he went into the desert. So the first thing you can anticipate feeling during Lent is hunger. Now, we should never

not eat to a dangerous degree, but for most of us, we eat far more than we need to eat

and far more often than we need to eat. Lent is a season of fasting.

As you probably know, it is required by people old enough to do it, not by little babies, of course,

but is required by people old enough to do it to not eat meat on Fridays.

Now, this is a small sacrifice for most. Probably having macaroni and cheese for your entire

meal wouldn't feel like much of a sacrifice to you. What's more important, what is very important than we give up meat,

make sure that you do that. But what we also need to be doing is we need to be fasting in a real

way. Things I encourage you to do is to cut out snacking. If you were anything like my children,

you love snacking, especially really sweet and salty and yummy snacks. It is okay to feel a little bit of hunger between meals. In fact,

it is a good and holy thing to feel hunger between meals. Why? Because the urgings of our body are usually a way for our

spirit to also remind us of what we also need. When we hunger, it can be a reminder that we really hunger for God, that we will never be filled up or content unless we seek God's love.

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