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After spending the first month of the year planning and reflecting on last year, it’s time to take a few concrete steps for my garden and my faith. We can build new raised garden beds and start filling them, purchase soil amendments, trellises or animals fencing. This month, we also welcome the Lenten season of preparation with prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. We attend Ash Wednesday Mass to represent our repentance from sin as well as Jesus Christ’s sacrificial death to set us free from sin and death.

When I was much younger, I was always asking and hearing, “What are you giving up for Lent?” Chocolate, cakes, cookies, and soda were always popular answers. Occasionally, one clever classmate would attempt to give up homework or broccoli. As I have grown, the answers have shifted as well as the intent. This month, we will be getting an early start on our spring cleaning and donating items to St. Vincent de Paul.

For the garden, I’ll be spring cleaning by moving the sheep bedding/hay to the chicken coop, the chicken bedding to the compost, and the compost to the garden. It’s a labor-intensive domino effect that starts with fresh hay and ends with a productive garden! We can wring productivity and usefulness out of seeming waste if we put in the effort. The new raised beds need to be filled, allowed to settle, and planted with the earliest crops. I’m going to move my strawberries to a raised bed to hopefully avoid being overtaken by weeds. I’ll also start some seeds through winter sowing. This is a new project for me this year, and one I am very excited about. It makes me wonder: how are we sowing seeds in ministry?

My oldest daughter will be making her First Reconciliation and First Holy Communion in April. I feel blessed that she will be able to do so at the church where she was baptized, and her parents were married. St. Henry has been the church my husband and his parents have attended for most, if not all, of their lives. The preparation for these sacraments has been made easier for parents using colorful workbooks and short, engaging videos. Completing the course for these sacraments is best with steady blocks of learning and reflecting, rather than trying to cram it all in at once. Slow and steady, bit by bit, that is how the garden, and faith, grows.

 February in the Garden of our Heart…

I always have a feeling of anticipation before Lent. The Mass readings seem a little more intense. Places of growth in my heart are rising to the surface. Bad habits are becoming more obvious. Ideas for how to approach the season with intentionality flash through my head.

The air feels a little more charged. And God feels a little bit closer.

That’s what the season of Lent is all about, after all. Getting closer to God by going into the wilderness with Him. Lent is a time of preparation for Easter, and these weeks are a time of preparation for Lent.

During Lent, we are meant to follow Jesus to the deserted place like his disciples did in the Gospel last weekend. The deserted place – the wilderness – is not a place of punishment or loneliness, but a place of encounter with the Lord. In these penitential, preparatory seasons, we take the time to grow in our relationship with Jesus. We remove distractions, pray more often, do good works, and spend more time in silence to hear the voice of God.

As Molly described in her own gardens, growth doesn’t just happen on its own. There is a lot of work and preparation that leads to flourishing in her strawberry patch, vegetable garden and the collection of those pretty chicken eggs. The same is true in the life of faith. There is a lot of work and preparation that leads to flourishing in the gardens of our hearts. How can we intentionally prepare ourselves for Lent this week? Where is the Lord calling us to focus our preparations?