First week of Lent

“What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save him? Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, "Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed," but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead. But someone will say, "You have faith; I have deeds. "Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by what I do.
James 2:14-18

The first week of Lent often seems to be accompanied by questions along the lines of ‘What are you giving up for Lent?’ followed by laudable personal goals like eating or drinking less, exercising more and so on.
Then, as the 40 days go on, or after them, this exercise in privation in the face of temptation sometimes ebbs away, much to our chagrin.
To encourage us in our efforts, some priests have preached about Jesus Christ’s 40 days and 40 nights of fasting and temptation by the Devil in the desert.
But when I think of Lent in this way, it seems that when many of us ask ourselves what our act of faith will be, we are framing the question in the negative, rather than the positive.
It’s as though we make a deal with ourselves that this is the penance we will choose for ourselves for this period of time and then it’s back to business as usual.
It’s almost as though we are implying to ourselves that we think the loving God we worship wants us to harm ourselves.
Maybe a more successful way to achieve what we set out for ourselves during Lent is to flip this logic on its head: our loving God actually wants us to choose a course of action during these 40 days to get rid of some of the junk in our lives.
And that by praying for God’s support in this crucial period when trying to shed old, harmful habits, proves most difficult, we end the exercise taking one step closer to our loving God.