How will you enter into the holy season of Lent this year? Exodus 90 might be known best for its ninety-day challenge but it also offers content throughout all the seasons of the year. Its Lenten challenge begins on Ash Wednesday, focusing on the Prophet Jonah and other major prophecies of Jesus’s Passion.
Lent invites us to follow the Way of the Cross through prayer, fasting, and almsgiving–reaching out to God, disciplining our bodies, and helping those in need. Too often, however, we just give up a single item and miss the opportunity to enter more deeply into this time of conversion. In the past, Christians fasted for forty whole days with only one meal in the evening and no meat or animal products. Even if we don’t return to that ancient rigor, we can still do more to take up our cross daily to follow Jesus.
Exodus 90 offers daily reflections and a set of disciplines that will make this Lent a more focused and profound experience. This specially crafted program provides concrete steps to live out Lent to the full, beginning with daily Bible readings and reflections and thirty minutes of prayer. To keep our attention focused on God during this holy time, we will also avoid unnecessary smartphone and computer usage (excluding work, of course). We will fast and abstain from meat on Wednesdays and Fridays, and engage in regular, intense exercise to keep our bodies disciplined. And we will give alms, one of the primary aims of Lent, by avoiding unnecessary purchases and making an additional contribution to the poor of your local community on a weekly basis.
In addition to fulfilling the aims of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, we will also support one another by building stronger brotherhood with weekly fraternity meetings and a check-in with an anchor, one member of the fraternity who will serve as an additional support. Finally, we will celebrate Sunday as the Lord’s Day, as he has asked us in the Third Commandment, embracing rest and leisure to honor God and enjoy time with our family and friends.
We follow in the footsteps of Jonah, the reluctant prophet, who was reborn from the belly of the whale. Jesus revealed this to be a foreshadowing of his own Death and Resurrection, which we, too, must experience in our conformity to him. We embrace this sign of Jonah, ordered toward repentance and charity, as the goal of our Lenten journey, dying to ourselves, taking up our cross, so that we might live freely as sons of God.
If you’ve always wanted to go deeper and embrace the spirit of Lent more fully, we hope you’ll join us for a daily challenge that will lead you one step at a time, following behind our Lord on the road to perfection and true freedom in him. Or, if you missed joining us for Exodus 90 or intended to join and for whatever reason didn’t get to, now’s the time to join men from all around the world for our Lenten challenge.
