Skip to main content

Advent: Training for Christmas.

Advent is a great time to refocus attention on the spiritual life and growing in the Christian faith. As a runner, I can see a similarity between running and the spiritual life. When I am running and preparing for a race, I get very focused and am methodical in my training plan. I have a goal and I work toward that goal with intensity. However, when there is no race on the schedule, my training can become lax and unfocused.

That is kind of how I am seeing this advent as well, with the Christmas season being the finish line and advent the training season. It seems to me that like being well prepared for a race enables me to enjoy the race itself and reap the benefits of my training with the goal of the race being met by a new personal best time and finishing strong. In the same way, being well prepared for the Christmas season will allow me to experience more fully the joy of the season.

This Advent I plan, God Willing, to focus and prepare with intensity for the Christmas season and the coming of our Lord. As for the particular training program I will be using, I have decided on the program that has produced many champions (saints) over the last 2,000 years. I will be using the tried and true form of Christian training, the prayer, fasting, and alms-giving plan.

Is this a big commitment? You bet because I know that I will have to focus intently on my training and make sacrifices in other areas of my life, but I know it will be worth it when I am running strong into Christmas morning and throughout the Christmas season.

Have a blessed and fruitful advent!
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Running Goals or Running Goal; What is it That I Want?

The other day I got all caught up in setting running goals for myself for the rest of the year. After the goals were set, I found myself starting to worry about how I was going to reach them. Wondering if there would be time to sufficiently prepare for them all. My goals were to run a 5k in under 20 minutes, to run a half marathon in 1:25 minutes and qualify for and run in the Boston marathon in 2014. At first, I thought that setting and meeting these goals would make me a more serious runner. In fact, I thought that to be the "serious" runner I want to be that I needed these goals. However, while I was running the other morning I realized that first of all, I was thinking about how to shift my training to meet my 5k goal. Then I began thinking about the right approach to a 1:25 half while training to qualify for Boston in a full marathon a month later. That is when I realized that the ancillary goals were starting to consume my focus and quite possibly i...
4 comments
Read more

The Rosary: Staying Focused

There are several obstacles that someone who has committed to pray the Rosary will face. Since the Rosary is a long prayer one of the biggest challenges I face is staying focused. If you have read my other posts or if you are just familiar with the prayer, you know that the mental contemplation of the Mysteries is the main focus of the prayer. So getting distracted really detracts from the prayer. Even if I am only praying 1 chaplet of the Rosary, it still takes about 20 minutes. In that amount of time your mind is bound to wander some. I have found several different things to help me when my mind begins to drift off to the worries of everyday life. The first is to understand that this is going to happen and be watching for it. If I am not vigilant I can get through a whole decade and realize I have not thought one single time about the Mystery that I should have been contemplating. So before I begin the prayer I make a conscious determination to be watchful of my wandering mind. O...
3 comments
Read more

My AMDG Run: An Answered Prayer.

I have never been a person to pray for specific favors. It never felt right to me. My prayers generally are for strength, guidance, an acceptance of what comes my way. That is always how I "felt" right praying. To pray for a specific favor like a good grade, to do well in some competition and things like that just always felt a little wrong and to pray for physical healing was something I never would have considered. I am not saying this was any kind of selflessness. I am not sure exactly what it was. A fear of seeming childish or perhaps it was out of fear that my faith would be shaken if the prayer wasn't answered. Regardless, this is how I generally pray. And that is not to say that I don't or didn't think that God doesn't concretely answer prayers. I believe that He does. For instance I have always prayed when overwhelmed something like "God, I cannot do this all alone, please help me" and I will somehow, someway find my way through whatever it...
3 comments
Read more