With Lent starting in just a week, we’d like to invite you and your family to spend this famously spare season in an unusual way—undertaking a challenge designed to help you get maximum enjoyment out of life. Sound provocative? Read on.

There is a problem with Lent and with the Christian life in general. It is most often posed as sacrificing worldly things in order to gain closer union with God, which is certainly true, but this formula leaves out a crucial piece of the equation. It doesn’t factor in that most people—ourselves included!—aren’t spiritually advanced enough to be driven by our desire for union with God.

The hard truth is that we have too much of a taste for worldly things (and their easy dopamine hits), and that means the leap to spiritual things (and their hard-won fulfillment) is just a bit too far. So, despite our desire for the fullness of the good for which we were created, we often experience Lent (and the Christian life!) as a slog that we can’t wait to see in the rearview mirror.

Enter the Trinity House Lenten Challenge, a way of life that puts the spotlight on what God designed to fill that crucial gap, allowing us to make the leap from a cheap taste for worldly attractions to a rich desire for spiritual things. You see, God put something into the world where the material and spiritual come together, forming a perfect bridge for growing our desire for union with Him. Our bridge to a closer union with God is other people—especially our families.

And in our family and friends lies the secret to why the devil doesn’t want us to take up the Trinity House Lenten Challenge. Because the evil one knows that our desire for communion with our loved ones is the strong assistance that we need—to decrease our taste for worldly attractions and increase our desire for the show-stopping interpersonal communion that is the life of God. 
 
It’s as simple as it sounds. When we decrease the amount of time we spend on unnecessary, addictive, and largely impersonal activities—movies, video games, scrolling, shopping, overwork—it frees us up to spend time with our loved ones in more valuable, interpersonal activities like conversation, walks, working side-by-side in the home, reading aloud, or singing together. Similarly, when we turn away from overindulgence in alcohol and food, our minds and bodies become clearer and stronger, and we’re able to be present to our loved ones in deeper ways.

The progress of a Trinity House Lent should be very similar to any good detox program. At first, the removal of the things that have been giving us cheap dopamine hits makes us quite irritable. But instead of throwing ourselves directly into individual spiritual goals, let’s first devote ourselves to more interpersonal activities that increase family bonding, like the above-mentioned walks, talks, working and cooking simple Lenten fare together, and more family prayer time. As we regain our taste for the communion we’re made for, we will sense those feelings of irritability subside.

As we get further from the addictive rushes, we get closer to true fulfillment. As we spend more time in relationship, growing our family bonds, our desire for the source of our family’s love in His image will also grow. By the end of Lent, God will have drawn us from the bridge of a beautiful, engaged family life all the way into a greater union with its source. Not only will we have greater desire for God, we will have much more ability to focus on communion with Him in prayer, fasting, and almsgiving or service!
 
In other words, the Trinity House Challenge calls us to move from a life of impersonal distractions to a life of communion with God with—and even through—the “communion of persons” of our families.  You might say that this is a year-round Challenge, and you’d be right. But by focusing on a concentrated version of this in Lent, we can make an impact in the short-term that allows our families to enter the Easter season—and beyond—with a new sense of togetherness and of our deepest identity as an image of the Most Holy Trinity.

OK. But what might the Challenge actually look like for your family? One simple way to do it is to replace whatever impersonal activities you spend too much time on with more attention to the Main Activities of each of the five levels of a Trinity House (here’s the Heaven in Your Home Flowchart for reference). They are:

1) a Holy Sabbath for Faith Life,
2) a weekly Date Night for Person & Relationships,
3) a weekly Life Meeting for Household Economy,
4) a daily Family Meal for Family Culture,
5) and One Outreach for Hospitality & Service.

If you already have these foundations set, you can add another activity from each level that increases family bonding, like daily family prayer, individual “dates” with children, a shared work project in the home, reading aloud together, or a community service project. The Flowchart and our online toolkit provide lots of other ideas.

We all need encouragement—and lots of it—so each week through Lent we’ll include insights and ideas from those who are taking up this Challenge. If you would like to encourage other families with a few words about how your family is taking up the Trinity House Lenten Challenge and applying it specifically in one or more of the five levels, let us know (contact@trinityhousecommunity.org)!

As we prepare to journey through this season of detachment, let’s not forget that we’ll be gaining a taste for what we most desire. Instead of each family member having a Lone Ranger Lent of individual feats, let’s come together and build a family that reflects God’s image into the world. Our prayer is that we’ll discover the treasure that is hiding in plain sight: the presence of God in our homes, in our loved ones whom God has entrusted to us. Our families bear the imago Trinitatis—the “image of the Trinity,” and they are our most sure means to greater union with Him!