The Holy Week Game Plan

What is your game plan for Holy Week?

Maybe that question strikes you as odd or you've never thought much about making a "game plan" for the week leading up to Easter. But I want to invite you to reflect on how you approach the holiest week of our Liturgical year.

How are you going to make this week look and feel different than the other weeks? How are you going to enter into the last week of preaching, suffering, and passion of Jesus Christ - the Son of God?

For most of you reading this, you will still have to go to work. Your kids are still going to wake you up demanding food and milk. Those dirty diapers are still going to need changing and the bills will still need to be paid. Yet the Holy Spirit still wants to move and work in your hearts in a unique way.

Jean-Pierre de Caussade, in Abandonment to Divine Providence, reminds us that these ordinary things are the very things that would make us more like Mary - Jesus' perfect disciple:

"There are few extraordinary features in the external life of the Blessed Virgin. At least Holy Scripture does not record any. Her life is represented as exteriorly very simple and ordinary. She acts and experiences the same things as others in her state of life. She goes to visit her cousin Elizabeth, as her other relations do. She takes shelter in a stable, a natural consequence of her poverty. She returns to Nazareth after having fled from the persecution of Herod. Jesus and Joseph live there with her, supporting themselves by the work of their hands. This provides their daily bread, but what is the divine food with which this material bread feeds the faith of Mary and Joseph? What is the sacrament of each of their sacred moments? What treasures of grace are contained in each of these moments underneath the ordinary appearance of the events that fill them? On the surface, these events are no different from those that happen to everyone, but the interior, invisible element discerned by faith reveals God himself performing great works."

So we know that the duties of our state of life are the very things that can form us and mold us more into the image and likeness of God - but we must have the faith to see God in the duty of the present moment.

With this in mind, my invitation for you this Holy Week isn't to go off on some desert retreat or spend all day every day in a Church. Rather, the game plan I would invite you to create is how you can better enter into and practice the presence of God in the duties of your day.

For some, this will mean removing distractions.

You've hopefully been fasting this lenten season - but how else can we prepare ourselves to enter into the Mystery of Christs' passion, death, and resurrection?

Here are some ideas:

• No social media from Palm Sunday mass until your celebrate Easter Mass.

• No unnecessary cell phone use around your family and friends.

• Read Pope Benedicts Jesus of Nazareth book on Holy Week

• Pray the stations of the Cross with your family

• Set a reminder at 3pm every day to pray the Divine Mercy Chaplet, or at the very least to pause and take a moment to dwell on the cross of Jesus.

• Carve out some time for a Holy Hour or an additional daily mass WITH your family.

• Pray a morning offering and beg for the grace to see God's will in the little duties of your typical day.

This list isn't exhaustive but my hope for you this Holy Week is that you make it different. Not in an extraordinary way perhaps. But by living more intentionally in Gods presence.

Here is my prayer for you. I pray that this Holy Week is truly holy. Set apart. Not like every other week. Consecrated to God. Whatever that means for you in your life.

May God bless and keep you this Holy Week and draw you closer to him, through His Spirit, to be more like His Son - Jesus.