Many Christians are thinking about Lent, which starts this week. So I am posting this for those few of you here that are interested in that. My husband and I found the following video I post here to be useful and illuminating.

It has been wounding but good (in a painful, cleansing, exposing-the-truth sort of way) to have so much corruption in the church exposed in recent times, and to face the truthful fact that in some places on high, things are much worse that most of us thought. What can we do about it? These guys, TnT (Taylor Marshall and Tim Gordon) have done a lot of intelligent exposé explanatory videos on the current news stories and a lot of what is behind them, and my husband and I have found it very illuminating, incisive, and balanced. In this video, they talk about what kind of response we can have as lay people, and they say (as I suspected - but had been beginning to wonder if I would HAVE to go this route) that holding protests, letter-writing campaigns, even withholding funds will all do nothing. This very bad stuff is not about what we see, but about powers and principalities, and some spirits can only be cast out with fasting and prayer. And Lent is upon us, so we are all thinking about what that means anyway. Here TnT talk about the history of fasting for Christians and what it has meant in the past from the days of the earliest days to the middle ages to Aquinas and more recently pre- and post-Vatican 2 [post is really lame, of course!]. I have various thoughts but I will leave you to your own thoughts, if this is a topic for you: