Musings From My Heart's Canvas...

17th February '2010...Lent starts today and for me Lent is something that has always carried more value in my spiritual life than Christmas or any other Christian festival. I have observed lent since i was a child i guess, may be when i did not even know the real meaning of Lent. I would thank my parents for having infused so much importance for such religious beliefs. Since last 6 years, I have observed lent as a more serious aspect for enhancing my spirituality, my closeness to the Almighty.
This year is my first lent in US and i am not very excited about it. I am in the US and that means i would be breaking the lent without family. That is something that doesnt really make me very excited as i believe partaking with family makes it more spiritual and complete. But i guess experiencing difficult situations is also a route to being close to GOD. Being in a country like US, i was not expecting to see much religiousness around me. But i was surprised to see people talking about Ash Wednesday, about going to church, about Lent. When i first landed in US, i did get a culture shock! But since my brother has been staying here for about 7 years now and i keep hearing stories about different things here, i was still doing ok after the culture shock. I had been to a couple of American churches here and after seeing the spiritual life here, i could clearly say how different it is from India. After meeting so many people who by birth are christians but by practice are atheist, I was not expecting people to be giving any kind of importance to observing Lent or anything related to Lent. But by the end of the day i did happen to see a few people having ash on their foreheads, and a few people talking about going to church for the evening service, meeting up for the ash wednesday mass etc etc. Its sad to see that after how much this country has been blessed by GOD in terms of so many wonderful things, people have become so comfortably unbothered of their creator. But at the start of the holy lenting days, i am happy to see that there still are a few of them who do respect HIM.
I am just hoping that this lent moulds me to become more of a person that GOD wants me to be and i get closer to fulfill HIS purpose for me, cuz without HIM i am nothing but Ash.