Repentance

A powerful definition of what it means to repent.

Precisely because God is gracious, merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness (just as the Prophet Joel tells us), God also calls out to us and says, “Turn ye even unto me, with all your heart, and with fasting, and with weeping, and with mourning.” What Joel describes here is “human repentance,” a miraculous invitation from God to become like him in the only way that we can: by submitting to the power of his grace, by turning away from everything in our life that is disobedient, sinful, and false, and by turning to the one and only Living God.

By his invitation to repentance, God gives us the opportunity to imitate him as loving children. He allows us to recall and to repudiate the sentence of death that we have imposed upon ourselves by sinning, and to replace it with a life of grace. By his Son’s death and resurrection, he gives us the supernatural power to take on his holy commandments, not as strokes of the lash, but as the blueprint for our reconstruction and rehabilitation in his own image and likeness.
Fr. Louis Tarsitano

Hat Tip: Lent and Beyond