The six weeks of Lent—which start on Ash Wednesday—are an important time of preparation for the joy of Easter. During Lent we aim to give up (or take up) an activity that helps us to focus on the forty days that Jesus spent in the wilderness. He spent that time alone in the desert in prayer and fasting. We hope that by denying ourselves something we enjoy—or taking up a regular task that isn’t so easy for us—we might be ready for Holy Week, when we follow in Jesus’s footsteps from Palm Sunday to his death on the cross on Good Friday and his bursting from the tomb on Easter Day.
