Lent and Charity

If you live you your whole without any real want, if you have food to eat, a bed, warmth, clothes, and medical care how can you truly love the poor and desire to help them?  You need to experience what it means to want something to know what it is like for you brothers to want.  Lent can give us very small glimpse into want.

When we fast from real things, not just chocolate and soda, but heat or food.  We learn a bit what it's like to not have those things.  Of course seeing we can just break our fast from heat or food we don't really know what that is like.  We won't know what it's like to see our children do without th, but at least in our bodies we can feel the cold and the hunger.  This is one of the things Lent can give us if we allow it.  Depriving ourselves from comforts makes us appreciate what we have and can make us sympathetic towards those who have those things.

It isn't too late to add something to our Lent.  Fast from comfort, even if is just on Fridays.  Sleep on the couch and fast from a warm bed.  Look at what you normally spend for food in a day, cut it in half, and see what that's like and give the savings to charity.  If you are really adventurous, on a Saturday morning find a food pantry and stand in line with everyone else and eat what they eat for breakfast, give what you normally spend, or more, to the food pantry.  A group here in Austin called Mobile Loaves and Fishes has a Holy Week retreat each year where you spend 3 days living, eating, and sleeping on the streets of Austin.  The retreat ends on Holy Thursday.  It's a great way to enter into Easter.  I would say that the charity I received out on the streets was the the most profound I ever experienced.  Christ gave us himself, can't we give more?