Lent

I am hurriedly doing my part to polish off the last of the king cake before Lent begins. I was staring at it this morning, in all of it's colorful iced glory, and when my husband walked in I informed him it had to be gone by tomorrow. So we did our part, and breakfasted on king cake. The breakfast of champions, don't you know!


I think I'm ready for Lent. I still feel like a brand-new catholic, even though it's been two years since I became official, so I always wonder: am I doing this right? Can I be doing a better job trying to impart the meaning to Bella? But I'm trying, so that has to count for something.


Bella has decided she is going to give up gum, something she sees as an enormous sacrifice on her part (and I don't doubt that it is). And as for myself, I still had not decided until this morning. I had been mulling over a couple of things and was still unsure and then I read this post by Aimee over at The Mother Load, which made a lot of sense. And I hope she doesn't mind if I quote her, briefly -

"If there was something I thought I could NEVER do -- for GOD -- then I was
too attached to that thing."

That completely blew me away. What an incredibly good point! Because I have been thinking the exact same thing. My first thought, when I was trying to decide what to give up for Lent, was to give up TV. And then I was aghast - there's no way I could give up TV! I could come up with a reason after reason why giving up TV would never work - I spend time at other's peoples homes who watch TV, I like having the TV on for background noise when I'm home by myself at night, I would miss 'The Office' and the new season of 'Ghost Hunters', and so on and so forth. As the saying goes, I had a million excuses but no good reason. So TV it is, then. Yikes.

We also have a couple of other little things going on around the house, and our biggest project is attempting to raise, entirely within our household, enough money to 'adopt' a retired Salesian Sister. The Salesian Sisters are in charge of Bella's school, and they are so wonderful that we thought maybe this could be a very small way for us to do a little something to return the favor.

I will close by once again stealing Aimee's words, hoping that Aimee keeps in mind that imitation (or blatant thievery without permission, as in this instance) is the highest form of flattery:

"But I do know that if I don't do this, I will regret it at a very deep
level because it is ultimately not about something as small as blogging (*or, in
my case, TV*). It is about something as big as what God wants from me."

That Aimee, she's one smart cookie. But if you want to tell her, do it quickly before she closes the com box!