It's Day 23, How is Lent Going?

This Lent I thought that I would give up something meaningful, so I gave up tortilla chips.  As a normal person, you may think that giving up tortilla chips is a crazy thing to do.  Who gives up tortilla chips?  Yes, I know that most normal people give up things like candy, chocolate, soda pop, T.V. or Facebook, but I’m not normal so I gave up tortilla chips because I was eating them all the time. I would eat them with my meals, I would eat them between meals, I would eat them in a house, I would eat them with a mouse, I would eat them here or there, I would eat them everywhere. And, I couldn’t figure out why I was never hungry.  I just thought that I had a small stomach, but apparently I hadn’t realized how many tortilla chips I was eating.

The first week without tortilla chips was really hard.  I stopped eating them, and all of a sudden I was always hungry.  It was an unbearable hunger that I couldn’t figure out what to do about. What was I going to eat now that I wasn’t eating tortilla chips?  It wasn’t until the second week of Lent that I realized that I probably should eat something else instead of continuing to obsess over how I couldn’t eat tortilla chips. I tried eating apples (yum), and carrots (yum!), and pears (yum! Yum!), and even grapefruit—I never thought that I would see the day that, instead of eating tortilla chips, I would be eating a grapefruit and like it.  Last Sunday I decided to eat a few tortilla chips, since Sundays are not officially part of the 40 days of Lent, but the chips just didn’t taste as good as I remembered them tasting.

Now it’s day 23 of Lent and I’m beginning to think that I wasn’t hard enough on myself.  Maybe I should give up something else; on the other hand, getting over the obsession I was having with tortilla chips by fasting from them has given me more time to focus on the other aspects of Lent, such as prayer and almsgiving.  For me, giving up tortilla chips has been actually good for the soul.

Now, how is Lent going for you? 

Give Me This Day My Daily Tortilla Chips

Of all the crazy things I’ve done in my life, giving up tortilla chips for Lent has been the craziest thing I’ve done.  Running a marathon, homeschooling my children these are nothing compared to giving up tortilla chips for Lent.  I thought I would stretch myself, force myself to focus on sacrifice, be a good Catholic and give something meaningful up for Lent.  For me, that would be tortilla chips.  The bargaining has already begun and it’s only Day Three.

“Fritos are not tortilla chips, right?”

“Crunchy crackers are not tortilla chips.”

“I know! I can eat Pringles, pretzels or Sun Chips.”

“What if I put cheese on top of the tortilla chips? They would then be nachos.  Nachos are not tortilla chips.”

This is not going very well at all.  I’m hungry all the time. Exactly how many tortilla chips was I eating?  Seriously, I’m eating the same amount of food.  How could I be so hungry? I also realized that giving up tortilla chips means that I can’t walk into a Mexican restaurant with their endless baskets of tortilla chips.  It will probably take me some time to figure out something else to fill the void created by the tortilla chips, something healthy, such as, celery sticks, but all I can think about is tortilla chips.  Obviously, this is a serious addiction.  Right now I’m wondering, if I should continue with the idea of giving up tortilla chips or think of something else.  How is constantly thinking about tortilla chips helping me to focus on my relationship with Jesus?  I’m working on this. Never would I have thought that something this simple could be so hard.

This Lent I will give up Liver and Onions and Chewing Tobacco

You need to give something up for Lent.  As Catholics, that’s what we're told all our lives.  But exactly why do we do this?  Sure, giving up chocolate, sweets, soft drinks and other guilty pleasures can teach us about sacrifice, but won’t most of us take these back up at the end of Lent?  I can’t even begin to guess how many times I’ve given up things.  As a wife and mother I’m always giving up my time and making sacrifices for my family.  During my pregnancies, which obviously were longer than Lent, I had to give up alcohol and certain types of foods. Currently I'm training for a marathon so I have to pay extra attention to the types of foods I’m eating and have to cut out activities that keep me from getting enough sleep.  Therefore, to me, giving things up for Lent seems to be the easy way out.   

Lent should be about conversion, about turning my life closer to Jesus. I think that I would be missing a great opportunity to grow in Christ if I gave something up for Lent just to be grumpy and miserable the entire time. Yes, I’ll be giving something up for Lent.  I’ll be giving up liver and onions, chewing tobacco and tortilla chips. Okay, I’m kidding about the liver and onions (I’ve never eaten that) and the chewing tobacco (I’ll be grumpy, just kidding, I don’t use tobacco in any form) but I am serious about the tortilla chips.  Anyone that knows me well knows that I can’t go one day without eating tortilla chips.  

“Yikes! We’re all out of food!”

Now, I will qualify that one by saying that if I find that this makes me uncommonly grumpy, I will abort this endeavor.  Of course, since Sundays are not officially considered part of Lent, I could always choose to eat my fill of tortillas every Sunday (Woo Hoo!).

In all seriousness, this Lent I will make a special effort to more fully focus on the three pillars of Lent: Prayer, Fasting and Almsgiving.  But for me, fasting is the hardest of these three.  Pray for me!