Shockingly, we are coming nigh on the end of lent. Did you know? I was laboriously drawing out a tiny calendar for myself, as I am in the habit of doing, and sat back in a breathless panic, beholding that Easter is like only two weeks away.
I’m sure everyone has had a super holy Lent, up to this point. I’m glad I didn’t try to give up swearing, what with all the election craziness swirling round. And I didn’t give up anger, which I depend on so much to see me through the evenings. No, honestly, as I sit here, the days slipping crazily by, I am hard pressed to remember what my Lenten discipline was. I think I must have had a vague feeling that, through extra personal holiness, I would just get thinner, as it were.
So of course, because of lent, which is the time that the Christian can struggle against sin if she wants to, knowing that “struggle” is the Christian word for failure, it appears from me standing on the scale just now that I have gotten a tiny bit fatter.
And….for the first time ever, I have some bad cholesterol hanging around.
Which makes thinking about the surgery gorgeous delights of Easter kind of a sorrow, which is Not The Point of Easter.
How did this happen! The getting fatter, I mean. Is it perhaps the combination of half hearted exercise with a side of sampling of cold tater tots and bacon from the platter of food delivered from the men’s bible study every Friday by my boys who eat it over there at church and then bring it home with them and plunk it on the counter, so that first thing when I walk downstairs, frantic with hunger, my hand just falls over the tinfoil to draw it back before my mind is even engaged? Maybe it is that Matt started making bread, wretched man, and then wants to know how it tastes, being unwilling to taste it himself, because of all the flour and sugar. And butter. And eggs maybe.
The trouble for me, as with so many things in life, but especially with having the scale climb up and up, is that I am generally filled with Self Loathing anyway. Don’t feel sorry for me or tell me to just stop it, it’s who I am. I’ve always really not enjoyed myself as a person. Thank heaven other people don’t hate me as much as I hate myself. But I am generally able to keep the self hatred at bay by being thin-ish. Just like when my house is clean I feel morally pure, when the scale says a certain number, I feel able to deal with reality. And when it doesn’t, the guilt and loathing rise up like a tidal wave of despair that carries me down the stairs and into the kitchen to pick at bits of things in the fridge in the way of searching out consolation.
Of course it’s a problem of the will, and of having bad habits, and of being a tiny bit lazy, and of vaguely lying to myself about how hard my life is, and of not trusting God to restore my soul, and of being busy and not paying attention, and of giving way to the vaunted needs of the flesh rather than clinging to the gracious life giving way of the spirit. News Flash. I’m a sinner. I need to be saved, even from the ridiculousness of wandering around the kitchen trying to figure out what to eat. But rather, what Not to eat.
I know, from a hurried click through the Internet, that I am not alone in my afflictions. If it weren’t for people like me, the economy probably wouldn’t exist. Certainly, YouTube itself was, as far as I can see, expressly invented so that I can lie on my stomach, clicking through wretched clips of people doing horrifying kinds of exercise, only to stand up and give up and wander away to do something else. Gosh I hate all those videos, almost as much as I hate myself.
Still, today is a new day, and tomorrow hasn’t even happened yet, so I will have another try. Some slinging of a five pound weight around, dragging the dogs up the hill against all our wills, a little corn beef and cabbage, maybe, passing over the potatoes by the incredible iron power of the will, and maybe even some prayer or something. It’s too late to fast though, right?
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