Of Lent, Love, and Food That Doesn’t Go Stale

I’m participating in the Keeping LOVE in LENT Blog Link-Up 2014, hosted by the Catholic Bloggers Network.

We’ll be sharing different ways, tips, stories and real-life experiences that will help us focus on Lenten sacrifices, prayer and good deeds and how to carry them out with LOVE instead of a GRUMBLE.

Please scroll to the five hostesses’ contact information at the bottom of my post so that you can click over to one of them and join in if you’d like!

When I was a child, we were allowed five candy bars a week, purchased during the family’s Saturday trip to the Sunshine grocery store. My sister ate hers as the spirit moved her during the week; I ate mine one per day when I got home from school. I never ate two per day, nor did I ever skip a day. I was disciplined that way.

Then, when I was nine or so, I gave up candy for Lent. Each Saturday when we got home from the grocery store, I made a production of putting the candy in a tin box in a cupboard. Oh, the suffering I was doing for God!

Easter morning came, and I didn’t look for the basket the Easter bunny had left for us. No, before anyone else got up, I went into the kitchen and scrambled up and got that tin box down and prepared for feeding frenzy.

I bit into the first one: stale. I tried the second: stale. Then the third: stale. Sighing, I threw all the bars away. What a waste of good candy, I thought, and resolved never again to give up food for Lent.

Fast-forward several decades, most of them spent away from an active faith life. In my Lenten sacrifices these days, I focus less during Lent on keeping food out of my body (other than on days of abstinence and fasting). Instead, I focus on feeding my soul and my brain and my heart.

For example, this Lent, I’m offering up time researching female saints and blesseds, including martyrs who were tortured in ways that had to be sent by the devil, women who showed their love for God and community by serving people on society’s margins, women who lived their ministry by loving their spouses and children. I’m writing and putting together a video about one of them each day during Lent. That’s time I had been spending on Mah-jongg and other online games. It’s a ministry God gave me a couple years ago, this getting inside these virtuous women’s lives and finding ways we can all relate to them today.

I haven’t bothered to see how many people are reading my posts or looking at my videos. Because in the end, the number doesn’t matter. The people God wants to touch are being touched. What matters is obedience… and grateful acceptance of God’s will for me in this time and place. And that won’t go stale on Easter morning.

Please visit these love blogs hosting Keep Love in Lent: