The Passion of the Christ, is a helpful movie to consider for Ash Wednesday and Lent. Nothing's pretty about it. Our faith isn't based on pretty. Every time I finish reading a gospel, I'm horrified with the beatings, the whippings, and the humiliation Jesus suffered. It's not pretty. It's real.

No matter what skeptics in the ancient or modern world might say, Christianity isn't a religion anyone would make up. Considering what Christianity originally meant (not the Christian faith's styrofoam substitute in America, promising that faith will make everyone healthy, wealthy, and wise), Christianity is about Jesus' dying a painful death for us and our life changed into his pattern, who'd make up that?

We humans always want life easy. Our affluent society today merely raises our desires furth…