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There’s something about Ash Wednesday that draws us in, calls us to return to sanity, to a change of heart and mind.

Lent doesn’t take us away from our ordinary lives, but rather it invites us to bring a new and holy attention to those activities. This should be the way with all of our spiritual practices. We take time apart in order to return to our daily activities with new inspiration. God will always surprise us with possibilities when we least expect them. Let this Lent be one of those surprises.

In its fullness, prayer is an encounter with God that transforms the way we see and interact with the world. It is like a bright light that reveals what we otherwise do not see: When we wear glasses or look through a window away from the light, we can believe that the glass is perfectly clean. But turn our perspective and hold it up to the light, all of a sudden we are able to see smudges, scratches, and cracks that have been there all along but completely hidden to our normal consciousness. That is the effect that an encounter with God can have on our lives.

Joy is something that gives us life. It is something that gets us out of bed in the morning. It is a lasting sense of positive meaning, something that not only survives the hard times but carries us through them. If that is the way we feel about something—or maybe more importantly, if we do not feel this way about something—we cannot ignore it in our discernment. God, I truly believe, does not call us to a life of misery and despair. And how could he?

With a life in Jesus as our foundation and nothing else, God’s call to us and our ultimate purpose in life tend to look very different. Thinking less about the decisions themselves and more about the life those decisions effect, we realize that what matters most to God is ultimately not what we choose but the amount of love that those decisions create in our lives; where we go to school, what we do for a living, and our familial life matters to God only to the extent that what we choose enables us to live as Christ-like as we can.