Hello, there!

I have some thoughts for you this week-before-Lent. Hang with me until the end because we want to offer you everything that the Take Up and Read membership has to offer for free as Lent begins.

First, here are some things I’ve been thinking about “Pre-Lent.”

This year, Lent begins on February 22. That means that right now is the perfect time for “pre-Lent”-- a short period of time before Ash Wednesday when we have the opportunity to prepare our hearts and our environments for Lent. The time is now to prayerfully consider how God is calling you to renew your heart, transform your mind, and reform your actions to rediscover (or truly discover for the first time) the mystery of our risen Lord.

In order to do this important work, find some silence. In that silence, determine how to create more silence. Lent should be quiet. To enter into the desert of Lent, we need both interior and exterior silence. Since we live in such a very noisy world, it’s going to take some time and effort to establish silence in our lives. We need to consider carefully how to distance ourselves from the distractions that fill life with so much noise that we can’t hear our Lord and so much stuff that we can’t see him. Our world is not conducive to quiet recollection, so if we want to pursue it for Lent (and we do), we all need to be intentional.

Cardinal Sarah’s powerful book, The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise, is a beautiful place to begin. Don’t wait until Lent; start reading now to craft a quiet, pondering place for yourself throughout the forty desert days.

This quest for quiet is an urgent one if we are to notice and listen to God. Cardinal Sarah writes, “Without silence, God disappears in the noise. And this noise becomes all the more obsessive because God is absent. Unless the world rediscovers silence, it is lost. The earth then rushes into nothingness.” Noise begets more noise. God won’t compete with the noise. You won’t hear him over the din of daily life.

Consider all the ways you engage in noise. We live in a world of constant conversation. At the swipe of a finger, a myriad of voices comes alive in the palms of our hands. Looking for silence? Start there. Then, consider how our smartphone habits have created new circuits in our brains. We’ve trained ourselves to always be engaged in the noise of our world. Our brain is always busy. Cardinal Sarah poses an important question: “If our ‘interior cell phone’ is always busy because we are ‘having a conversation’ with other creatures, how can the Creator reach us, how can he ‘call us’?” For human beings accustomed to being perpetually available, it’s good to ponder if our souls our similarly accessible to God.

We need to wake up to the power of silence. Noise numbs us. More accurately, we numb ourselves with noise. We are constantly hearing something, but are we truly listening? Or are we barricading our souls with a wall of noise because we are uncomfortable in the quiet? Cardinal Sarah challenges us to think about the role incessant distractions play in our lives. “Noise is a deceptive, addictive, and false tranquilizer. The tragedy of our world is never better summed up than in the fury of senseless noise that stubbornly hates silence. This age detests the things that silence brings us to: encounter, wonder, and kneeling before God.”

What if this Lent is your time to encounter wonder? What if this is your season to kneel before God in silence and let him fill the void? What can you do right now to open yourself to that possibility?

At Take Up & Read, we have long hoped to create a community that is intentional about living out the gospel. We want to equip you to approach scripture every day, to ponder it deeply, and then to allow it to animate every minute of your life.

We have some tools all lined up to help you do that this Lent, to help you turn off the noise and enter into a deep and seamless relationship with your Savior throughout your day.

We’ll be with you every morning at 9:00 Eastern on Instagram live @takeupandread to engage with the daily Mass readings. There’s no subscription necessary! Just come with your Bible and an open heart. In fewer than fifteen minutes (usually), we’ll jumpstart your day.

There’s more though (and you can get it for free, too)…

Our membership community meets once a week to dive deep into scripture. For Lent, we’ll be taking a very close look at the Sunday Mass readings. We’ll meet on Zoom every Thursday morning, and those meetings will be recorded and posted to the membership blog, so you can listen when you like.

We’ll have some periodic meetings throughout Lent to consider together “the problem of pain,” and why God allows suffering. Those, too, will be Zoom meetings.

And there will be a couple of coaching meetings to help you consider what “holy wholeness” looks like and equip you with tangible tools to put it all together and live it out in your daily life.

We are SO EXCITED about a digital notebook we’ve created to help you be quiet and purposeful and self-nurturing this Lent. It’s an all-encompassing daily tool to guide you into the most meaningful, enriching Lent we can imagine.

Now, let’s get to the free part:

I’ve mentioned previously that Beautycounter has kept the lights on at Take Up & Read. Indeed, this little side hustle that I never even considered doing until five minutes before I did it (if you don’t know that story, email me and I’ll share it), has blessed the socks off our ministry. Micaela and I have some beautiful plans for Take Up & Read, and they will unfold over the next year or so. The Lent Notebook is the beginning. But those plans are powered by some significant investments in education and in infrastructure. And it’s my Beautycounter business that has made those investments possible.

We want you to reap the benefits of that Beautycounter financial contribution, particularly this month. For the next three days, Beautycounter has a wonderful promotion. Anyone who makes a $125 purchase will receive a full-size Glow First Priming Serum for free. It’s awesome. I love this product. I use it nearly every day. Sometimes, I wear it under makeup so that the makeup goes on more smoothly and so that it stays on all day. Often, I wear it without any makeup at all because it “finishes” my skincare routine beautifully, and I just decide to skip the whole makeup step altogether. It’s a fantastic primer with a whole host of healing and protective skincare benefits that leave your face glowing. If you spend $125 at Beautycounter between now and Monday, you get that for free.

But you also get a month of Take Up & Read membership for free. As a thank you for your support, I want to make everything we have to offer inside the Take Up & Read membership available to those of you who are supporting the ministry by buying Beautycounter using my link. If you make a $125 purchase between now and Ash Wednesday using this link, we’ll send you a code for a free membership to TUAR for the first month of Lent.

You’ll have full access to all the archives—that includes hundreds of hours of Scripture study videos, lots of faith-filled articles, and our new digital Lent Notebook to go along with everything we’re planning for Lent 2023. We would so love to have you with us and we sincerely hope you take advantage of this opportunity. (Current members: we see you, we love you, and we’ll be sure to credit you as well.)

Also, if you are new to Beautycounter, you can use the code CLEANFORALL30 and take 30% off your first order.