Some days are like that...the beginning of Lent

Well, here it is, the first day of Lent. I admit to neglecting my spiritual preparation before holidays, and actually completely forgetting that I could/should be preparing my heart for the joys of Easter. My life has me living at a pretty fast clip. I do it to myself: no one forced me to have all these children, no one forced me to have a photography business, be a Beachbody coach, homeschool my preschooler or begin the adoption process. (People DO force me to feed them...enter screams from a certain toddler!) So often I have my To Do list ready so I can hit the ground running...

Wake up.


       Quiet time and journaling.


                                          Workout.


                                                      Shower. 
                                                                                        
                                                               Off to the bus. 


                                                                             Start the laundry.


...and then the day's TO DO list begins...So when I have a day where I wake up with a headache, slice my finger (thank you food processor!) and discover the internet won't work...which then leads to a GREATER PROBLEM...(suffice it to say that after an hour and a half on the phone with Apple support--who did AWESOME by the way--I learned that there was an irreparable error on our hard drive and had to ERASE it all. Yes, really. Rebooted from a 2 1/2 month old back up. This means I lost A LOT OF STUFF.)

Well, it's just time to step back a second and take stock. What am I doing with my life? Is all this busy-ness getting me anywhere? Time to pull out those yearly goals that I'm supposed to be rewriting and revisiting weekly to stay on task. Okay, so out of my top ten goals for this year one in particular "Memorize Romans 12" is not getting done. Hmmmm.

And then I considered that today is the first day of the LENTEN SEASON I asked myself,

"What can I give up?"

Chocolate?

                                   Breads?

                                                             Time online?

Then it simply occured to me: I do not NEED to give up anything. Jesus does not look at me and say, "Amy, if you do _____________, I will love you more." I already am loved at the full capacity. No, I totally don't get that. I probably never will. But it's true. Jesus is not looking for me to make Him happy by denying myself chocolate for forty days (Although I've done it before...well, mostly, I made it to Passover! LOL)

So, since I've made very poor progress on my goal to memorize Romans 12, I'm going to ADD something into my life for Lent. 

My Lenten experience will be daily taking 15 minutes of time where I can aloud practice my Scripture memory. And the cool thing? It doesn't have to be done without kids. In fact, today I did it while tossing the dog's ball and snuggling Darrah Kate! And I got 1 1 /2 verses into my noggin! (Oh how much faster I'd learn it if I were a child!) 

So for now, I will stop, stretch my muscles, breathe deeply and review what I learned in Romans 12. I am so far from perfect, so very far, but today has been claimed as a day to rebuild (thank you computer!) rather than make great headway.

And some days are just like that.



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Oh, and by the way, I've signed up to take a 6 week journey with World Vision through their LENT: ACT:S Relentless Acts of Justice. Here's the video that goes with today:

Feel free to join in as well! Here's the link to begin.