When I was pondering whether to enroll in a master's program in pastoral studies, my cousin Mary gave me some simple yet solid advice.

Mary had already been through the program, and she knew it was an expensive degree, and that money was a concern.

"If the Lord leads you to it, the Lord will lead you through it," she said.

OK, maybe you don't like catchy little aphorisms, but I do. For one thing, I can remember them easily, and often at their kernel is some profound advice that bears remembering.

So, believing that the Lord was leading me to it, I enrolled and have never been sorry.

During Lent, I would like to pull aside the rich young man of the Gospels --- he appears in Matthew, Luke and Mark --- and say to him like a wise and firm auntie, "If the Lord leads you to it, the Lord will lead you through it."

The rich young man (Mt 19:16-22) is so very like me, and probably like most of you reading this. He was a good person, and he lived righteously. He could honestly say that he kept the commandments. My guess is that he also fulfilled the mandates of his Hebrew faith to be generous to the widow and the orphan. He was a solid member of his community.

And now, of his own volition, he sought out Jesus to ask, "What more do I need to do?"

Sadly for him, the answer was more than he was willing to trust himself --- or the Lord --- with.

"Go and sell your possessions and give the money to the poor. ... Then come, follow me," Jesus said.

So the rich young man went away sad because, Matthew tells us, "he was a man of great wealth."

Don't you love to imagine what happens to the characters in the Gospels as they disappear from the text?

I imagine the rich young man goes home and continues to lead a righteous, comfortable but probably uneventful life. He becomes the Gospel equivalent of the Chamber of Commerce president. And when he dies, he dies painfully or peacefully with his family all around him in the comfort of his accumulated wealth, but always with a nagging sense of "what if?"

For to how many people in the Gospel did Christ direct individually those magical words, "Come, follow me?"

The young man was privileged to hear them and he turned away.

From what did he turn? Perhaps a life of privation, on the road preaching the good news. Maybe he turned away from martyrdom in the footsteps of Peter and Paul, Stephen and so many others.

For sure he turned away from adventure, from a chance to change lives, from a chance to rub shoulders with the great men and women of the first century. He turned away from a chance to meet death with all his integrity intact.

Mostly he turned away from what the Lord was leading him to.

What is the Lord leading us to this Lent? What's preventing us from following? Where I am too fond of my accumulated wealth or my time, my addictions to food or drink or television or shopping or fear?

Prayer, penance, charity --- that's the great tripod of Lent. Like the three-legged stool, Lent can't stand up unless we honor all three.

What a great chance to ask the Lord sincerely in prayer, "What more can I do?" And then step with trust into the perhaps life-changing acts of penance and charity through which he will lead us.

Effie Caldarola is a columnist with Catholic News Service.