At the start of our Ash Wednesday liturgy, we prayed that the Lord would “grant that we may begin with holy fasting this campaign of Christian service.” Our Holy Father called Christians throughout the world to make yesterday a day of prayer and fasting for peace in Ukraine, and, to make the rosary a part of our Lenten prayer for that same intention.

As the ashes on our forehead remind us, each of us was marked with the sign of the cross – an external sign of our internal conversion of heart – a sign of our mortality and our vulnerability, of our need for repentance and of our oneness with Christ who saves and changes the world through sacrificial self-emptying love. And as Saint Paul reminded us, we were sent out as “ambassadors for Christ, as if God were appealing through us.”

Our readings today present in the starkest of terms the nature of this holy endeavor. In Deuteronomy, Moses addresses our ancestors in the faith, stating that: “Today I have set before you life and prosperity, death and doom. If you obey the commandments of the Lord, your God, loving Him, and walking in his ways, you will live, and the Lord, your God, will bless you. I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life, then, by loving the Lord, your God, heading His voice, and holding fast to him.”

In the Gospel, Jesus reminds his disciples, and so all of us, that “if anyone wishes to come after me, they must deny themselves, take up their cross daily, and follow me.”

Well team, we have chosen life, and to walk [and to maybe run] in God’s way, which is ultimately, the way of the cross. We are just one day and a few strides in to this season of holy perseverance, the long run that is Lent. As any runner preparing for a race would tell you, it’s important to visualize the race to its end. With that in mind, consider the opening words for Palm Sunday, which concludes the Lenten season and carries us in to Holy Week: “Dear Brothers and Sisters, since the beginning of Lent until now, we have prepared our hearts by penance and charitable works. Today we gather together to herald with the whole Church the beginning of the celebration of our Lord’s Paschal Mystery, that is to say, of his Passion and Resurrection. Therefore, with all faith and devotion, let us commemorate the Lord’s entry into the city for our salvation, following in his footsteps, so that, being made by his grace partakers of the Cross, we may have a share also in his Resurrection and in his life.”

How will you feel when you hear those words on Palm Sunday, looking back over these forty days? What will the world be like forty days from now?

What the world will be like forty days from now is known only to God. But insofar as we open our hearts to God, “following in Christ’s footsteps,” the world may well be a bit more imbued with Christ’s saving love and mercy, because those who bear his name and loving presence in the world “have prepared [their] hearts,” stayed faithful, and waged a “campaign of Christian service” every step of the way.