Transcript:
Greetings, beloved in Christ. I hope that you are well on this day, and I pray that you are having a blessed Lent. In an earlier video, I spoke about what I was giving up for Lent. I talked about how I am abstaining from social media and from alcohol for this Lenten season. What I didn’t talk about was what I am taking on as part of my Lenten discipline, and I want to share that with you today. In this season of Lent, I am taking on being intentional, setting my intentions. Before I pray, before I study scripture, before I have a meeting, I’m taking a few minutes to set my intention and making sure that my intentions are rooted in my baptismal covenant. Making sure that my intentions for connection, for understanding, for deep listening are rooted in who I believe I’m called to be and who I have promised I will endeavor to be with God’s help.
Practicing intentionality leads me to recognize that in this broken and sinful world, there is often a gap between our intention and our impact. Sometimes we could have the very best intentions going into a situation and inadvertently cause pain, cause trauma, cause suffering, and that truth reminds us of our need for repentance. That even with the very best of intentions, we can somehow not do the right thing, the good thing, the faithful thing. And so we repent. We ask God’s help, and we move forward with intention. If we don’t set our intention, I think we are more likely to find ourselves in those painful situations. And so I am practicing being intentional. Being intentional about my communication, being intentional about how I connect and how I react, and asking myself at the end of every interaction, did I meet those intentions or did I go astray? The great thing about our God is that divine love is always waiting for us to acknowledge our fault and to figure out how to make it better. And so I invite you as you contemplate your faith, to think about setting your intentions.