Marriage takes a lot of work. People change countless times and in countless ways over the course of their lives. When you marry someone you are offering to acclimate yourself to the constant changing of the other person. You are vowing that you will learn the evolving person he/she will become - how and what (s)he thinks, understands, needs, wants, expects, desires, feels, needs accountability for, their weaknesses, strengths, vices, tendencies, hang-ups, failures, successes, hopes, dreams, goals, and the evolving call of God on their life - and how you can best relate to and care for that new person. You are vowing to spend the rest of your life doing that over and over again. It takes a profound level of care, maturity and selflessness to live up to that vow. All the while, YOU are changing. And your circumstances are changing. And the people and places around you are changing.
Dating is an incredible opportunity to let God teach you an introductory course on how to become the kind of caring, mature and selfless person that your particular future spouse needs while experiencing change together over the course of time. You owe it to your future spouse/lover/friend/co-parent to take the time to become the person who can best care for him/her. You may want to rush that. (S)he may want to rush it. But if you genuinely desire to provide a lasting, loving, healthy and resilient relationship for the other person - if you genuinely want to not cause that person heartache down the road - you must be mature enough to put on the breaks, to take the time to let God mold you and mature you into the best spouse/friend/lover you can be for the person you love. Thats how you know your love is eternal. Thats the fruit of the vine of eternal love. Your ability to do that - to take the time to grow because thats what you both need, instead of hurrying up and getting married because that's what you most urgently want - that is what will make your love resilient and your marriage strong enough to last.
Rambling over.
Crawling and Landing
So far our journey through Lent has turned from a sprint to a crawl. On Fat Tuesday, Jeff commented on our poor eating habits which launched us into the concept of fasting for Lent. Momentary enthusiasm overtook thoughtfulness, busyness begot neglect, we failed to talk through the plan of fasting TOGETHER and we jumped from the nest before the egg hatched. Turns out eggs don't fly. Or at least, not for long and the landing isn't pretty.
Day 1: Fail. Painful awakening to the experience of hunger. Had all the potential in the world to be meaningful but honestly, we were just trying to survive our bodies' revolt so the meaning was lost on us.
Day 2: Fail. And success. Repeat of day 1 but we finished the day reading from a prayer guide. Prayer, psalm, scripture, reflection, hymn, prayer. It was an intense time of meeting God together. Intense and beautiful.
Days 3-10: Yo-yo. We've had to regroup several times. Altered the "rules," reconsidered the guiding purpose and goals, talked through logistics and failures together. It's been good and bad and really difficult to see the good through the bad.
Lessons: I know my body is a temple but I don't genuinely believe that or I wouldn't treat it the way I do. I know the resources and food available to me are a gift but I don't treat them with care. I have dependency on food for mood elevation that simply isn't healthy and I have significant room for growth when it comes to discipline. Also, I really don't like Indian food.
Accomplishments: We stopped throwing out food needlessly. I do not cook a dinner meal if there are still leftovers from the previous. We eat less and are still alive. We talk about our eating habits; failures and successes. We think about the food we eat.
Goals: To know God more and in a new way, enlightened by our experience with fasting but not wholly relying on it. To spend time together intentionally praying, worshiping, reflecting and studying God's word. To improve our eating habits, to do well with the resources and bodies God has entrusted to us. To care. And to lighten up.
What now: I have to be honest, I don't think we are going to see this thing through. God has been moving powerfully in our lives and circumstances recently. He's also set himself up to move even more powerfully in our immediate future. We are actively and excitedly waiting on him and engaging with him. But this year it feels as though our plans for Lent are distracting us from God's plans for this season. We are wading through how to handle that. At this point the simplest answer is to stop the distracting behavior and focus instead on what God already started. I wouldn't be surprised at all if one of the lessons God is trying to teach us is how to land.
Day 1: Fail. Painful awakening to the experience of hunger. Had all the potential in the world to be meaningful but honestly, we were just trying to survive our bodies' revolt so the meaning was lost on us.
Day 2: Fail. And success. Repeat of day 1 but we finished the day reading from a prayer guide. Prayer, psalm, scripture, reflection, hymn, prayer. It was an intense time of meeting God together. Intense and beautiful.
Days 3-10: Yo-yo. We've had to regroup several times. Altered the "rules," reconsidered the guiding purpose and goals, talked through logistics and failures together. It's been good and bad and really difficult to see the good through the bad.
Lessons: I know my body is a temple but I don't genuinely believe that or I wouldn't treat it the way I do. I know the resources and food available to me are a gift but I don't treat them with care. I have dependency on food for mood elevation that simply isn't healthy and I have significant room for growth when it comes to discipline. Also, I really don't like Indian food.
Accomplishments: We stopped throwing out food needlessly. I do not cook a dinner meal if there are still leftovers from the previous. We eat less and are still alive. We talk about our eating habits; failures and successes. We think about the food we eat.
Goals: To know God more and in a new way, enlightened by our experience with fasting but not wholly relying on it. To spend time together intentionally praying, worshiping, reflecting and studying God's word. To improve our eating habits, to do well with the resources and bodies God has entrusted to us. To care. And to lighten up.
What now: I have to be honest, I don't think we are going to see this thing through. God has been moving powerfully in our lives and circumstances recently. He's also set himself up to move even more powerfully in our immediate future. We are actively and excitedly waiting on him and engaging with him. But this year it feels as though our plans for Lent are distracting us from God's plans for this season. We are wading through how to handle that. At this point the simplest answer is to stop the distracting behavior and focus instead on what God already started. I wouldn't be surprised at all if one of the lessons God is trying to teach us is how to land.
I'm Still Hungry & Fat Saturday
Lent once was an entire season of fasting. All the food that would spoil during Lent (before the day of refrigerators and freezers) had to be eaten or thrown out. So a day of feasting took place the day before the kickoff to Lent. Hence Fat Tuesday. Eventually it morphed into a day to get all the sin out of your system before the fasting and repenting season which is where Mardis Gras comes from. Since we decided to start our fasting on Sunday (42 days before Easter), Saturday was our "Fat Saturday."
The nature of our experiment is to confront the issues we have with over-eating and wasting food while the majority of the world goes hungry. We do not intend to starve our bodies or punish ourselves. We just need to gain some perspective, to discover what it means to be mindful and responsible with food and even to experience the want of food in ways similar to the want of the world, the want of the poor. As a sort of nod to the culture of the child who we sponsor in India, there are a few Indian queues we will take in food choice. One of those includes eating fish and chicken occasionally and no other meat.
Having shared a love affair with beef all our lives, our Fat Saturday menu included BBQ tri-tip sandwiches, fries and soda for lunch and tacos for dinner followed by banana splits for dessert. I said repeatedly throughout the day, this is your last chance! Eat whatever you want! But the Lord had already started working in me to match my gluttonous appetite with a sadness over it's existence. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed every bite, but I stopped myself from jumping from privilege to pig.
This morning, it began. I opened the fridge, saw the leftover taco meat and immediately started coming up with excuses for why we should eat it and eat it right away. However, I realized it was that old food-crisis-anxiety welling up in me so I talked myself down and walked away. For breakfast on this Day 1, I had half of a plain slice of wheat bread, 1/4 of an apple and some water. For lunch I had a scoop of rice and a scoop of bell pepper/onion sauteed in 1/4 oz tsp of butter and a glass of water. I'm still hungry. 5 hours and counting before dinner. For dinner, I am cooking beans, reheating rice and maybe making a couple tortillas since in India they too have beans, rice and a flat, round bread. Probably nothing alike to my Mexican version, but common ground is common ground so I'll embrace it.
Realization: I'm hungry but I know I'll have another meal today. Not many people can take comfort in knowing they'll have a third meal.
The nature of our experiment is to confront the issues we have with over-eating and wasting food while the majority of the world goes hungry. We do not intend to starve our bodies or punish ourselves. We just need to gain some perspective, to discover what it means to be mindful and responsible with food and even to experience the want of food in ways similar to the want of the world, the want of the poor. As a sort of nod to the culture of the child who we sponsor in India, there are a few Indian queues we will take in food choice. One of those includes eating fish and chicken occasionally and no other meat.
Having shared a love affair with beef all our lives, our Fat Saturday menu included BBQ tri-tip sandwiches, fries and soda for lunch and tacos for dinner followed by banana splits for dessert. I said repeatedly throughout the day, this is your last chance! Eat whatever you want! But the Lord had already started working in me to match my gluttonous appetite with a sadness over it's existence. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed every bite, but I stopped myself from jumping from privilege to pig.
This morning, it began. I opened the fridge, saw the leftover taco meat and immediately started coming up with excuses for why we should eat it and eat it right away. However, I realized it was that old food-crisis-anxiety welling up in me so I talked myself down and walked away. For breakfast on this Day 1, I had half of a plain slice of wheat bread, 1/4 of an apple and some water. For lunch I had a scoop of rice and a scoop of bell pepper/onion sauteed in 1/4 oz tsp of butter and a glass of water. I'm still hungry. 5 hours and counting before dinner. For dinner, I am cooking beans, reheating rice and maybe making a couple tortillas since in India they too have beans, rice and a flat, round bread. Probably nothing alike to my Mexican version, but common ground is common ground so I'll embrace it.
Realization: I'm hungry but I know I'll have another meal today. Not many people can take comfort in knowing they'll have a third meal.
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