On Lent…

Posted on March 5, 2014 | 6 Comments

I’ve always made jokes about Lent.

Stuff like – “I’m giving up Lent for Lent this year.”

I make no excuses. We never really made that big of a deal about Lent while I was growing up – even though we were church-goers. And as I grew older I tended to grow away from the church just a little.

I have always been a believer in the idea of God – I’ve just always been a little allergic to those folks you meet who take the whole thing just a little more seriously than I care to.

Still, now that I have begun writing about the Bible stories I feel that I would be demonstrating a strong degree of hypocrisy if I didn’t get to know that side of life a little bit better.

So for this year I have decided to observe and accept Lent as best as I can.

I had rode from work on the bus yesterday thinking about this very thought. I had made up my mind that I would give up sugar for Lent. Heck, I am overweight and it would not hurt to shave a few calories that way.

But then – this morning – I got up out of bed and heaped a plateful of leftover pancakes and dumped some syrup on top of it. I fried an egg and put ketchup on it.

Then, over breakfast, I asked my wife just when exactly did Lent begin.

Hey – I hadn’t heard ANY announcement.

I figured I’d just find out when it started so I could get busy and get ready for it.

“Today,” she said. “It starts today.”

Whoops.

Isn’t that just like a fellow? Start driving down the road without bothering to read the map.

Well – I decided that I needed to re-evaluate my Lenten observance – SO – I have decided to give up pastries and candies for Lent.

Sugar is a bit of a demon for me and by golly I love a cake or pie more than you could imagine but from now until April 17 I am going to give up PASTRIES and CANDY.

I will make an exception for my wife’s birthday cake. I will have a piece of that. But other than that I am saying “No thanks” to PASTRIES or CANDY.

That includes chocolate, durn it.

🙂

I don’t know if this will make me a thinner person. There’s that whole love affair I have with bacon to consider.

Yours in storytelling,

Steve Vernon

 

Uncle Bob's Red Flannel Bible Camp - From Eden to the Ark

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6 responses to “On Lent…”

  1. davidprosser | March 5, 2014 at 9:50 am | Reply

    Best of luck Steve but at least bacon is neither cake nor candy so you can indulge without guilt. Save me a bacon butty please.

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  2. M T McGuire | March 6, 2014 at 6:15 pm | Reply

    That’s the coolest cover ever. As for giving stuff up. One of the team vicars at my church preached about giving stuff up. Every year his boss would give up cigarettes for lent. This was a while back in the 60s. Apparently it would make this guy like a bear with a sore head and all the folks working for him and all his parishioners couldn’t wait until Easter Day when he could have a blummin cigarette and turn back into a human being.

    So relax, chill and don’t feel you have to give up stuff for the sake of it. There’s no point worrying unless it means something.

    Cheers

    MTM

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    • Steve Vernon | March 6, 2014 at 6:48 pm | Reply

      I hear you – and I’m not setting up any sort of unrealistic restrictions for myself. I still have plenty of sweet in my diet – what with ketchup and relish and sweet pickle and peanut butter and jelly. I’m just cutting out the candy and pastries and such.

      It won’t hurt me and it’ll stretch the food budget a little as well.

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  3. Suzanne Church (@canadiansuzanne) | March 7, 2014 at 1:00 pm | Reply

    I’m not much of a church-goer, despite my overly-Christian name. But more than once, I’ve given up something for Lent, mostly because I think it’s a good exercise in restraint. Especially in my first-world somewhat privileged life.

    One year I gave up chocolate for Lent.

    That just happened to be the same year that my first rejection on my first NOVEL submission arrived, right smack dab in the middle of Lent.

    Man, I cannot begin to tell you how HARD it was to not eat chocolate that day.

    Good luck with your 40 days without pastries and candy.

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    • Steve Vernon | March 7, 2014 at 1:34 pm | Reply

      What I find amazing is the way I have started to NOTICE chocolate and candy and pastries. It wasn’t really all that much of an issue until I made the decision. Now I can’t walk through a store without noticing all of the candy and chocolate and pecan pie.

      Don’t talk to me about chocolate bunny rabbits.

      I guess that’s the way it is, isn’t it? The mind is a monkey – just like Stephen King often points out. It likes to mess with you any chance it can get.

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