Falling in love with God this Lent

In college a friend of mine quit a club with the simple excuse that
he'd gotten engaged. Some of us thought this was pretty funny at the
time, but there is logic to it. Sometimes it takes all your mental
energy to be in love, and all the boring business of everyday life
that interferes with being in love just falls away. In Lent, by
cutting down on some of the more useless elements of life's business,
we give ourselves a chance to recapture or find for the first time a
frisson of Divine love, to remember what it feels like to be in deep
mutual love with God.

Whatever you're doing for Lent, use it so that God has a chance to
reach you. If you're giving up TV, don't pick up a new hobby: find
time for silence or manual work so that God can speak. If it's a food,
that's (at least) three times a day you'll be reminded that God
affects your daily life. What else can you do with that knowledge?

All the space we could possibly make for God by eliminating TV or
iPods or by praying more would make no difference if God didn't reach
out. But the truth is that God is constantly reaching out to us, not
just during Lent; calling, sending flowers and divine text messages (I
<3 U n U R MINE.) We are too good at shutting ourselves off from God's
call, at distracting ourselves so that no insight can slip through, at
talking ourselves into the ideas of our culture and out of God's
genius plans for us. We know what we're about: deep down we know that
falling in love with God is a scary proposition. Better to fill our
ears with buzz and our days with tasks than to leave ourselves open to
the kind of enormous change our enormous God could demand.

But if we keep ourselves shut off from God's gentle nudge, we also
shut out the courage and energy and faith that God offers along with
those enormous, scary plans. And so we force ourselves to open, even
if it's just a chink in the armor, because we know God can shine great
light through a tiny crack. We risk and we receive, and we allow
ourselves to fall in love.