Didn’t blog at all in February!

Not even once!

Not that I wasn’t thinking about it. I just didn’t get round to it. I spent most of the month celebrating my birthday – which seems a little insane – but consider my position. Aside from routinely forgetting that it’s my birthday, most of my friends and family struggle to get me anything that is of meaning to me, and I hate receiving empty platitudes and stupid gifts so I find it easier to just do things my way. I spent every weekend/week doing things that I wanted to do with people that I wanted to do it with rather than sitting in my room waiting for other people to notice me and care! I have no regrets about it – except maybe that the whole month, including the week-long trip to Singapore, cost me a small fortune.

Otherwise, it’s Lent from Wednesday and it’s time once again to enter a season of purification and drawing closer to God. I’d like this to be a season of spiritual detoxing – getting rid of all those habits or behaviours that draw me away from God, coming away from them and being separate, meditating on the goodness of God and generally finding my way back to faith. I’d like this season of sacrifice to be an offering of praise, a reminder that God made the ultimate sacrifice for me and that the least I can do is offer this small sacrifice for him.

So what am I thinking about giving up?

1. Facebook. Definitely. I spend far, far too much time logging into Facebook and it is definitely detracting me from spending more time in prayer. The first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is check my Facebook! That’s sinful and has got to go!

2. Celebrity sites. I have to confess, I am a glutton for pop culture. I check these sites so often but I don’t know why. It’s not that I’m learning or even gaining anything from checking these sites. It just kills five minutes of my day. Every 10 minutes. Which if you think about it adds up to almost 2-3 hours a day spent looking at these meaningless images and absorbing this useless information.

3. Chocolate.

4. Red meat. Sigh. This is probably going to be the hardest. Not that I eat that much red meat anyway. It’s just that I like to know that the option exists. If I wanted to eat red meat I could.

5. Google Chat. On one hand it started off as a great way to keep in touch with friends and family overseas, but now it’s spiralling into something more dangerous. I spend so much time waiting for people to notice that I’m online and to try and chat with me that I find it hard to focus on just about anything else. I need to reevaluate my relationship with Chat, so I will log out for 45 days and see what happens.

6. the lie in. Time to go back to the 6 a.m. wake up call. It’s time to make space in my life for more quiet time. Especially now that the sun is rising earlier and earlier, I can wake up and pray as I run. I’m finding this a really effective way of getting my quiet time done.

so that’s my Lenten list. Lord, what do you think?

KT, contemplative.

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