The beginning of Lent

Are you going to give anything up for Lent this year? A recent poll stated that over half of all Brits who give something up in Lent don’t last the 40 days and give in to temptation! Well I’ve decided this year  not to give something up but to start something up for the first time ever!

Today is the start of Lent. This is the forty-day period before Easter, excluding Sundays; it begins on Ash Wednesday and ends on Holy Saturday (the day before Easter Sunday). The forty days are called Lent because that is the Old English word for spring. Sundays are excluded from the reckoning of the forty days because Sunday is the day on which Christ rose from the dead, so on Sundays we must celebrate Christ's resurrection. Today, Lent is marked by a time of prayer and preparation to celebrate Easter. We seek to recognize and respond afresh to God’s presence in our lives and in our world. We seek to place our needs, our fears, our failures, our hopes, and our very lives in God’s hands, again.

So this year I am going to start to write a blog and I want to invite you to join me. I’ve been thinking about how I can try and use the Internet in such away that can interact with some of you who read this column every week. Now I know people do read what I write , as almost every week I meet someone who tells me!! So now what I write here will also form the basis of a blog that I will write every week during Lent, My aim to is to write 2 blogs week and I invite you to come and comment and contribute. A blog is basically a journal that is available on the web. The activity of updating a blog is “blogging” and someone who keeps a blog is a “blogger.”‘ What I like about a blog is that it is not a monologue but a conversation. You can give me feedback on almost everything I write simply by clicking the ‘comments’ link at the bottom of each one of my posts.  The second thing I’m going to do through Lent is to read the bible every day by following a reading plan; I’m going to link into the Big Bible Project. This is a project which promotes Bible reading within a community setting, whether online or offline and makes use of Tom Wright's book Matthew for Lent. I’ll be blogging about this once a week and also use twitter every day to share a thought, so you can follow me on twitter too.

My hope is that through out this period of Lent we can create a little community and together use this time to prepare for, what for me is the most important Christian festival of the year, Easter. Why don’t you come and join me…