Seasons and Sacrifices

{Forgive the gratuitous Rosie pictures...I just can't.stop.}

I made peanut butter cookies again this morning. It's still Lent. I haven't been getting up early all week and I'm feeling my usual Lenten guilt. For all of my adult life, I've been pregnant or nursing or both, two things that "exempt" you (according to the Catholic church) from fasting during Lent. Sometimes I claim that and tell myself that my entire life is one endless sacrifice. But most of the time? Most of the time I just feel guilty that I really am not faithful in the little things. At all.

Last week I noticed Dinah sitting on the couch, playing a game on the kindle. Not something I'd normally mind, but I remembered she had told me she was giving up electronics for Lent. In my gentlest, most loving way I reminded her. She looked up to me and said, "Oh, yes. Well I gave it up for 3 days. Now I'm giving up sugar." I know that's just silly, and her fickle Lenten observance made me smile, but I thought about it later - and how it might just be wise, for me. Not to switch it up every time it gets hard, not that at all. But to remember that every time I slip up isn't a reason to mark myself as a miserable failure. That you can always, always start again. I tend to be a bit of an all or nothing type, so these reminders are most valuable to me. Just because daylight savings time did a number on my resolution to get up earlier doesn't mean that I should just throw in the towel, one week in. There's still a reason to try. Even when I don't get it right.

This week, we ran out of diapers. And there was a snow storm. And we have one car. And I really have diapers, I do. Stacks of them that I refuse to get rid of, that take up space in my tiny home because I want to be the sort of person who cloth diapers my babies. But two in cloth? Two toddlers? I didn't want to do that. When we ran out, I decided to take the opportunity as it presented itself. Alright then. Cloth it is. Cloth requires more diaper changes, more laundry, more of my time spent on my babies. Cloth might just be a good thing for me to claim today - just a little more sacrifice. A little more mindfulness. Silly, perhaps, diapering as a Lenten sacrifice. But today? In this season of life? It works. Today, when I didn't get up early and ate cookies for breakfast, Lent looks like this.

{For an excellent post about Lent, please check out my friend Billy Kangas's post "Lent is Not a Self Help Program." Such goodness and grace there.}

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