Wednesday of the Second Week of Lent

Then Jesus said to his disciples: If any man will come after me,

let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.

~Matthew 16:24

There is nothing picturesque about penance... In deciding to undertake a way of penance a man must know that he is leaving glamour behind him, that his motive must be to please God, that he will be called upon to bear crosses of a quite different shape from those he bargained for, and that the really effective part of it will be not what he does in the way of self-denial but what God does in the way of reproducing the Passion in the setting of his everyday life.  Thus the introduction to penance is to be severely objective, realist, unemotional... True penance is self-forgetting in the further effort to remember only God....  There is only one approach to penance, and that is the way of complete surrender to the will of God. ~Dom Hubert van Zeller, Approach to Penance

O dear Lord Jesus, grant me the courage and the love to follow You.