So today’s Gospel comes in the same chapter after Jesus was casting an evil spirit out of someone and the man was healed physically, but some of the people who saw it were saying that Jesus was doing these healings by the power of the devil.

Do you realize how much God loves you? "Of course!" you'll say. "I've heard that all my life! How could I not know that?" Unless you have experienced God's love for you and kept it in the front of your mind ever since. 

Today is the Feast of the Chair of St. Peter. Once again, we have another random, awesome feast. Why celebrate a chair, you ask? Well... it's not so much the chair itself but what the chair stands for. 

Fasting is meant to enact real change. It might seem from today's first reading that God is denouncing fasting in favor of action, but the two necessarily go hand in hand. God doesn't change, and yet Jesus says in the Gospel that "they will fast." That must mean that fasting is something desired by God after all.

It's Lent! Today we begin a spiritual pilgrimage through the desert with Jesus as we examine His life, death, and resurrection. Lent is about entering in to the story ourselves. Jesus says, "If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me." The three pillars, prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, of Lent are all ways by which we deny ourselves.