Living Differently for Lent

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Every year, it's the same thing: "What am I going to do for forty days?"

One year I wrote a letter to Lent.

Another year, I made a Top Ten List of things to consider giving up.

And I've shared my monstrously long post about Lenten ideas, activities to do with young children, etc., more times than I can count.

How about this year?

In addition to reliving that old letter and adopting some stuff from that Top Ten list, I'm introducing you to Living Differently.

It's a new website/project/collection/thing of beauty from Alicia Van Hecke, a fellow homeschooling mom and the genius behind Love 2 Learn: Favorite Resources for Catholic Homeschoolers.

Alicia and I are very much in sync in our approaches to sharing the faith. It's been fun to see her new site launch and unfold just as You Can Share the Faith is being published, because one would almost think we'd been working on these projects in tandem. (We haven't, but that's how sympatico we are.) We employ the same vocabulary (uncannily at times) as we talk about similar issues and approaches, about engaging the culture, about reaching out a person at a time, and about nurturing one's own faith and the faith life of the family.

Alicia sums it up this way, on the Intro page of Living Differently:

What I’d like to offer here is a kind of guide, especially for parents and their families, to cultivating ideas, attitudes, and spirituality in their own hearts and in those of their children, that will prepare them for this great task that we are all called to do – to go and make disciples of all nations.

We are so much on the same page that Alicia asked if she could give away a copy of You Can Share the Faith, and I told her I couldn't wait to help spread the word about Living Differently.

So that's what I'm doing at the end of this busy Ash Wednesday. I'm throwing out one more Lenten idea for you, just in case you haven't figured out what you want to do from that Top Ten list.

Here's the idea: Read and pray about one nugget per day from Living Differently. There's more than enough there for 40 days, and I think once you start digging in, you'll want to keep going well beyond Lent. You can start in the sidebar on the left, and work your way through the riches that Alicia is curating.

I'll leave you with my choice of reading for today, from the page, "Be Generous."

I wish you a fruitful forty days in the desert.

P.S. I almost forgot! It's been a long, busy Ash Wednesday. :) Here is the link to Alicia's giveaway of You Can Share the Faith.