What are you giving up for Lent?

Or maybe a better question is: what have you started doing this Lent to become a better person? Are you praying more, fasting, trying to get your spiritual life in order as we prepare for Easter?

All of those things are good. In fact, they’re part of the beauty of the season.

But sometimes, if we’re not careful, they can subtly reinforce a deeper assumption — the idea that we need to improve ourselves first… that we need to become worthy before we can really encounter God.

We often think the spiritual life is about getting our act together, becoming disciplined enough, holy enough, or good enough to finally approach God.

But the Gospel tells a very different story.

We have a God who goes looking.

A God who approaches us first.

A God who seeks us out and wants a relationship with us as we are today — not someday when we’ve perfected ourselves in the eyes of our own inner critic, or in the eyes of our family, our workplace, or the culture around us.

The surprising message of the Gospel is this: we are already enough. Today, Father Michael Rossmann reflects on this beautiful truth — that the real joy of the spiritual life isn’t that we finally reach God, but that God never stops searching for us