Lenten Practices Wrap Up

In case you are not listening to the podcast, which I truly believe adds a great deal of value, then I recommend going back and giving these a listen. The first one we discussed was prayer, then fasting, then alms. Each of these layered on top of the other to a make a wonderfully complete practice for ordering, or re-ordering, your life. I am often convicted in many of these conversations and thought I would share one of my convictions here.

I love great conversations. I am a practical person though, so for a conversation to be valuable to me, there needs to be something I can apply. This is where we developed the Blue Collar Scholar mindset. The Lenten practices are perfect examples of this. There are deep spiritual concepts that are really only brought to fruition once they are implemented. These concepts require action. We cannot sit in ivory towers and just discuss these.

One of the things we did a little differently in these episodes is that, instead of a life lesson, we said where we would start (except maybe the prayer one). I like this because it uncomplicated things a bit. I mean when you are really digging deep into a concept and it can seemingly get more and more complex. The more complex something is, the harder it is to start.

Take alms for example, I talked about how I struggle with this because I can’t do it all the things. AJ pointed out that it is ok to support those who do. That made my ability to provide for the needs of others more simple, direct, attainable.

That is what I’m taking away from all of these discussions. I need to find the most basic application to begin with and take action. I don’t need to solve world hunger right now. I don’t need to solve world peace. I need see what is within my 3 ft sphere of influence and take action. Once that action has been taken, ask myself what the next step is and just go step by step. We cover great distances by taking single steps.