It’s valentine’s day and BETTER YET, it’s Lent

So since Valentine’s Day fell on LENT this year … how about if we try to FALL IN LOVE with the perfect selves that we could be, if we would only get seriously about working on ourselves to be a more perfect Christ-like example of the human God created us to be. It will involve a lot of SACRIFICES and giving up things [at least temporarily] but that’s what Lent is all about.

An DON’T STRESS if you missed opening gunshot signifying the first day of Lent … you can still get in on Lent … you could do a good forty day of Lent any time you felt the urge to fast or REALLY BUCKLE DOWN hard on something for a forty day push.

Celebrations of rituals is similar to the celebrations of holidays on a particular day or according to a particular schedule.

You can celebrate the fundamental principles behind ANY of these danged human holidays or human rituals ANY TIME you want to … it is far more important that you spend the time seriously contemplating THE POINT of the ritual or holiday rather than worrying about when the crowd of gossips, busybodies and the whole peer-pressure lynchmob of conformists is doing to drag the unholy into their ritualistic conformance.

There’s no reason to go out and be deliberately antagonistic, but we can let the lost souls and dead bury their dead … the POINT of the holidays or rituals is fine … Lent’s a perfect example — the whole POINT of Lent is to tell Satan [and affluent excesses and addictions to human-based comfort] to go f*** himself … to quietly be able to just go without [for an extended period of time] to re-prove to one’s self that one can actually leave the booze or any kind of addictive comfort or pleasure alone for forty days … and instead do a deep dive on how much one’s affluent lifestyle is diverting one’s focus away from the passion of the Christ, how much God loves His creation and what God gave up in sending His only Son into hell to double down on the love that drives the beauty of that entire Creation.

When anyone feels called to celebrate the meaning of Lent, the forty days that are coming up are never a bad time … as people who try to live according to Heidelberg catechism, we might sometimes need reminders of what our only true comfort in this life and whatever comes after has to be.

This Lent … starting with right now, whenever now is …

We will BUILD our spiritual and mental efforts on top of the primarily PHYSICAL infrastructure we will be trying to build with our Strength, Conditioning, Mobility self-coaching syllabus … is always going to be a DEVELOPMENTAL work in progress we are attempting to implement disciplined INTENSITY of self-coaching and the CONSISTENCY always doing as many good, non-junk reps as we can do.

Better health needs to be the physical foundation of our OVERALL self-improvement program … but the point of our self-improvement program is spiritual self-improvement … supported by mental self-improvement … resting a top a physical foundation.

We are certainly not going to compete in any sport … in fact, at this point in our lives, we can definitely see the days coming when our physical well-being will no longer be assured … we also can see, by looking those around us, like the POTUS for example, that our mental well-being will also longer be assured. If we want to be better SPIRITUAL students or SPIRITUAL disciples, we should first provide the foundation of being more healthy and more fit so that we are even able to show up as willing students or disciples without getting to that point where we are praying for the end to come.

We are BLESSED to live in a world that helps us to be better and better disciples

We should be ASHAMED of ourselves for being ungrateful … or neglecting the opportunities this existence provides us, especially since life keeps getting better and better for us. We should be ASHAMED of ourselves for not being more grateful for the opportunities we have to be better and better disciples.

Since I like the way that AI prompt me to ask way more questions, I started by asking CoPilot and Gemini to curate a syllabus for a deep dive study of Lent including the most impactful spiritual, mental, and physical considerations for someone who is going to be especially serious for forty days about developing a plan for becoming like Christ or a more perfect modern-day example of the humans God created?.

The following outline was developed by CoPilot, Gemini … with my own input and editing [which might make it worse, or too biased] but you can just click on the link ABOVE … or copy the question into your favorite AI and see if you like that better. It’s not going to radically different than what you should expect, but an AI is good for mapping out a basic outline which you can modify, expand or re-prioritize to suit your own needs and circumstances.

Week 1: Understanding The Basic History of Lent

What’s behind this CLASSICAL tradition of Lent? Read and review the basic story and the theological basis behind the origination of the tradition. Focus on the Biblical basis of Lent. The first week is just about getting our head in the game and looking forward at the additional weeks as far as the reflections and preparations for Easter that we can make during Lent.

  • Introduction to Lent … Lent is entirely about SIMPLIFICATION and stripping away all of the bullshit that we humans tend to add on something. We SIMPLIFY at Lent in order to focus upon what we are commanded to do as Christians. Christ laid out the ENTIRE SET OF REQUIREMENTS for what we must do as Christians in just four verses … never forget these four verses, but if you can only remember one verse, remember the first one and it will help you remember the others.

    • Matthew 22:37: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.
    • Matthew 22:38: This is the first and greatest commandment. {HINT: Focus on this one first and foremost. Yes, it will help you when you struggle with the second one; but it’s the most important one. Do not blow this one. As Christians, we believe that the only path to God the Father is through Christ the Son.}
    • Matthew 22:39: And the second is like it, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.
    • Matthew 22:40: On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. EVERTYTHING ELSE in scripture is is just commentary on these two commandments; don’t complicate Christianity.

  • The Biblical basis for Lent

  • The significance of the 40 days –Lent is a season of forty days, not counting Sundays, which begins on Ash Wednesday and ends on Holy Saturday. Lent comes from the Anglo Saxon word lencten, meaning “lengthen” and refers to the lengthening days of Spring. The forty days represents the time Jesus spent in the wilderness, enduring the temptation of Satan and preparing to begin his ministry. The practice of fasting from food for extended periods like 40 days for spiritual reasons is found in all of the Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In all three, observing the tradition of refraining from eating is intimately, directly connected with the blessing of being able to devote additional focus to our prayer lives.

Week 2: Spiritual Considerations

  • The role of prayer during Lent … of course, we are always to pray without ceasing … but we kind of tend to fall back into old ruts and totally forget what that means and what it really takes. So during Lent, [since we are not wasting as much time preparing or eating food,] we go back to the basics of the basics of PRAYER and train in the preliminary assumptions and practices underlying our the fundamentals which underpin our prayer lives. In practice, this means that we spend time every day breaking down the Lord’s Prayer and focusing on our prayer habits so that we have something resembling a faint hope of getting our prayer life back on track within 40 days. {HINT: To do this correctly, it will actually take just over 9X longer than just 40 days we time-budget with Lent.}

  • Fasting and its spiritual significance … the spiritual significance of fasting is that fasting helps clarify our thoughts so that we can better remember what our true source of comfort is. Yes, it is true that when you don’t eat, you will of course suffer to a small degree, but it’s important not to overdo the drama about how we are suffering in solidarity with the poor. That’s BULLSHIT – the poor in spirit actually have bigger problems than just going hungry … being ABLE to fast, without worrying about where the money is coming from for survival is a LUXURY that the uber-affluent have … we should be exceedingly grateful for even being ABLE to fast without worrying about dying or losing everything we have left to lose. Besides, as Christians, we are directed to ensure that nobody sees our suffering, ie we are not to make a public annnouncement about how we will fasting for forty days. We are to keep our fasting to ourselves, except if someone asks us to join them in a meal, we politely decline … and when they insist, THEN we tell them, I’m sorry I really shouldn’t because I am fasting for Lent.

  • Almsgiving or more generally the SERVE FIRST approach to life … this is not at all just for Lent, but during Lent we can try to think more concretely about what we can do year-around. In other words, we should not JUST hand out soup in soup lines for 40 days and congratulate ourselves for being so charitable. The practice of almsgiving should basically be renamed the practices of REALLY GIVING A LEGITIMATE FUCK rather than just tossing some alms at it. In other words, if we are SERIOUS about the practice of assisting the poor, we need to think concretly about how we might go about the process of REALLY GIVING A LEGITIMATE FUCK to involve ourselves more directly to some way that can help the poor. Traditionally, almsgiving has been about putting more money in the collection plate or donating excess food, but increasingly since caloric needs are typically met with cheap food, just dishing up cheap food is nothing but idiot compassion.

We should do more than just engage in ostensibly well-intentioned actions [which have not been thought through at all] and ultimately contribute to making problems even worse or inspiring justified lack of gratitude from people who don’t need that kind of guilt-driven charity. Instead of focusing on long-term benefit, idiot compassion is about acting based on short-term impulses and the desire to avoid discomfort (our own or the other person’s).. Genuinely helping the poor, therefore, is really about getting to their level and genuinely attempting to helping those poor in spirit to “get back into the game”, perhaps by helping those who are struggling to find work or trying to overcome the despair of those who perhaps have even given up trying to “be in the game” anymore.

Week 3: Mental Considerations

  • Developing positive habits
  • Cultivating gratitude, joy, and openness
  • Overcoming challenges and temptations

Week 4: Physical Considerations

  • The physical benefits of fasting
  • Balancing physical and spiritual health
  • Understanding the connection between physical actions and spiritual growth

Week 5: Becoming Like Christ

  • Understanding the call to Christlikeness
  • Emulating Christ’s attributes
  • The role of the Holy Spirit in transformation

Week 6: Modern-Day Examples

  • Learning from modern-day examples of Christ-like living
  • Applying lessons from these examples to your own life

Week 7: Reflection and Preparation for Easter

  • Reflecting on the journey of Lent
  • Preparing your heart for the celebration of Easter

Alternative Themes / Focus Areas

In general, the weekly outlines might not really matter and you might find the above outline too constraining or somehow does not fit where you are at right now … EXCEPT that you will want to pick some sort of schedule or framework that that helps you get as much out of the Lenten season as you can. Here is an alternative outline of weekly themes or focus areas that you might also consider:

Week 1: Understanding The Basic History of Lent

Week 2: Repentance and Self-reflection

Week 3: Forgiveness and Reconciliation

Week 4: Love and Service

Week 5: Prayer and Contemplation

Week 6: Sacrifice and Simplicity

Week 7: Passion and Renewal

Spiritual Practices

Here are some spiritual practices that you might consider incorporating into your Lenten study:

Bible Study:

Daily readings focusing on Christ’s life, teachings, and the Gospels.

Use a study Bible, biblestudytools or different devotional guides to aid in your reflection.

Suggested study passages: Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7), Parables of Jesus, Passion narratives.

Prayer:

Deepen your prayer life, including meditative prayer.

Explore practices like the Examen or Lectio Divina.

Use a prayer journal to track insights and requests.

Fasting:

Traditional food fasting, abstaining from a specific item/meal.

Consider fasting from social media or news/sports/movies or other distractions.

Mental Disciplines

Mindfulness and Meditation:

Biblical meditation on God’s word and character.

Simple guided mindfulness meditations focused on breath and awareness.

Gratitude Journaling:

Daily recording of at least three things you’re grateful for.

Reflect on God’s provision and shift your focus.

Learning:

Study Christian theology, history, or the lives of saints.

Read a book focused on spiritual growth or a Christ-like characteristic you want to develop.

Physical Considerations

Embodiment: The mind and body are connected. Lent isn’t about neglecting the body, but caring for it as a temple.

Healthy Eating:

Focus on nourishing whole foods. See this as fueling your purpose.

Simplicity in meal preparation can free up time for other disciplines.

Rest:

Lent is not really the time for extra sleep deprivation.

If anything pay greater attention to sleep hygiene to ensure adequate sleep to support mental and spiritual well-being.

Movement:

Lent is DEFINITELY not really time to give up exercise … if anything, it’s the time to refocus on getting more serious about strength, conditioning, and mobility.

Incorporate activities you enjoy (walking, gentle stretching, etc.) as both physical care and prayerful meditation

REMEMBER the GOAL of this study of Lent is to deepen our understanding WHY we use this forty period for RENEWAL. It’s about spiritual rehabilitation, deliberately FOCUSING more of our attention and energy on spiritual growth and transformation.

This is ONLY a starting outline [which will be a work-in-progress thoughout Lent]. We will modify this outline to suit our personal needs and circumstances … and NEXT YEAR we might have a better outline for doing this again as an old AI tradition that we can always look forward to observing every year at Lent.