It's a great time to take 40 days to really focus on your prayer life, to think about,

have I been hospitable, have I been generous?

Who can I give to in this season as we come up on the highest holiday of the Christian calendar?

Hello, friends, and this mini episode of Verity podcast, I want to simply welcome you to the season

of Lent. While we won't be doing any particular Lenton series on this podcast, I wanted to introduce

Lent to you if you did not grow up in a liturgical church environment or are curious what it is

after hearing Christians talk about it. The

Lenton season is a 40-day fast, during which we lament and we dwell on the sacrifice of Christ,

looking forward to his coming resurrection during the events of Holy Week, ultimately celebrated on Easter.

Lent goes all the way back to the early church. In those first few hundred years of the church,

when it was developing and growing, what we saw was a 40-hour fast leading up to the day of Easter or Resurrection Sunday. On Easter itself,

you would often see many new converts baptized. And so what began as a 40-hour fast eventually

expanded into a 40-day period of time where they would often train catechumans or people who were hoping

to be baptized on Easter. From what we know of the early church, it actually appears that many

times they only baptize new converts on Easter. So it was a once-a-year event. So these 40 days

leading up to Easter were an opportunity to train these new

converts on the fundamentals of the Christian faith, the basic doctrines that they needed to know

before they made their public commitment and testimony to come into the body of Christ.

And so what we now know as this season of fasting was indeed a season of fasting in the

early church that carried through the medieval era to today, but it was also a time of reflection

and meditation on the core truths of Christianity.

Today we often hear about Lent in relation to social media fasts

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