Ash Wednesday & Lent Begins

Oh, yes, I spent lots of time thinking about Jesus yesterday and praying "Dear God!"

You see, we decided to give up some vices (as a family) for Lent this year. After a family discussion, we settled on no meat on Fridays--a nice traditional Lenten sacrifice. And truly, the way large-scale farms treat animals and the way they are processed so neatly for us consumers as to remove us from poor living conditions, death and butchering is a vice prominent in my life. I should give it up a little more often than Fridays in Lent. (We do get our beef from Pleasant Gap Farm, though: local, grass-fed, hormone & antibiotic free.)

The other vice my family and I over-indulge in is "screen-time," for lack of a better word. So, we picked our busiest day of the week and designated Wednesdays during Lent No Screen-Time Day. No TV, no computer, no Wii, no movies. The implications of this are huge: no blogging, email, facebook, Mario Cart, kidspbs.org, Nick Jr., American Idol results, Big 10 basketball, nor Olympics. (We did TiVo Olympics & Idol though.) But Wednesdays are busy days so it shouldn't be too much sweat: school/preschool, piano lessons, kids church, dinner... so by the time all that is done, it's only about an hour and a half before the kids go to bed.

Unless, of course, it's a snow day. Which it was.

Oh, want to know what a snow day in the Appalachians looks like? Mind you, this picture is from today -- the 4th snow day this week. I guess I should rephrase: the 4th cancellation this week.

I have just a little bit of cabin fever going on, in my defense. I know there are plenty of steep, twisty, curvy roads with "black ice" that makes driving a bus treacherous, but for crying out loud, can we please get a day of school in this week? June 10 should be summer vacation.

But back to Wednesdays during Lent: all in all, it went very well. The kids never asked once to watch TV or play computer games... never tried to get me to "bend the rules" since it was a snow day. They expressed frustration or wishfulness, yes, but no temper tantrums. And I certainly considered vices, sacrifice, and Jesus a lot more than usual... which is part of the point of Lent after all.