Hi, I'm Edward Sree, and welcome to all things Catholic Catholic where real faith meets real life.

Well here we are. Lent is upon us and I'm so excited Lent is here. Now I want to be clear there's

parts of me that are like oh no here comes Lent and there's all this stuff I got to

give up. Do you ever notice that as soon as you give up something,

all of a sudden you realize how much you crave it? As soon as you say I'm not going to do this in Lent.

It's like, oh, I really want to do this now. And it's just the way Lent is, but I also know it's really good for you. It's good for us. I know I need Lent. I'm reminded of something Pope Francis once said about Lent. He said this quote,

Lent comes providentially to reawaken us and to shake us from our

lethargy. I love that quote. Think about that again Lent comes

providentially. I mean something it's

something God is providing for us. It's a gift from him. What a wonderful gift that the

church gives us each year that we come to the season of the year where we can be refocused.

You know how you're pursuing the Christian life and you can kind of just get a little

lukewarm, a little bit stagnant, and it's just great that there's this chance to

reboot, to get restarteded to get to root out those

areas of weakness and and really recommit ourselves to Jesus.

A wonderful thing. I know that there's areas in my spiritual life that need to be

reawakened as Pope Francis says. I know there's areas in my spiritual life that need to be reawakened as Pope Francis says.

I know there's areas in my living that just bear becoming a little bit lethargic.

You know, it's not all bad, but I'm just not on the top of my game. I'm not given the best of myself in my relationship

with my spouse or my kids or my work or my God. There's areas I just know need a little bit of

fine-tuning. What a wonderful gift Lent is for us. Now I'm

going to say something that might be surprising here. I want to talk to you about what I

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