Have I Got a Lent Book for You!

You might be thinking to yourself right now, “What I need is a very thorough self-examination of my spiritual life and my relationship with God, and I really, really, want one that’s available on Kindle.  With a Caravaggio on the cover if you could, please.”

In which case I’ve got just what you need.

Lord You Know I Love You: A Discernment Retreat Using the Great Commandment is the kindle version of the retreat I wrote back in 2013 for the Pee Dee Council of Catholic Women.  It goes through the four ways of loving God as outlined in the Great Commandment, and allows you to evaluate yourself, your ministry, or your faith formation class and see how things are going.  The goal is to help you choose one thing that needs your attention most.

As I was going back through editing it for publication, two things impressed me:

1. It’s a really good book.  My goodness who wrote this thing??
2. I still need the stuff that is written here.

This was for me, yesterday, when I was totally failing at Lent:

It’s tempting to try to tackle every one of our weaknesses at once.  We want to be fixed, and we want to be fixed now!

And yet God gives us a life to be lived out in time. We are meant to grow and change bit by bit. We’ll have times when we grow very quickly, and other times when we seem to be in a holding pattern.

Sometimes it seems like we aren’t getting anywhere in the spiritual life.  In those times, the very act of battling against ourselves – however unsuccessfully – can be building up an invisible strength that will bear fruit later.

When we try to take on too many battles at once, we end up spread too thin. We’re unable to fight well.

And a whole lot of other stuff, too.

The Kindle version is out now, and a paperback edition is coming soon.