Lent-y Lent

So, it's been a whole month since I posted, and this is going to be a drive-by post as well. It's just not been in the cards for me to be reflective and stuff these days.

But...for Lent, I am doing something weird, for me. I gave up meat. I'm vegetarian. At least for the next 40 days, not counting Sundays.

Being a vegetarian is something I've thought about for a long time. I've, let's say, flirted with it, for several years now. I think it's something I should do, in theory, but I love chicken and burgers and all that stuff and have a meat-eating husband. So, it's just not happened. And in all honesty, without the miracle that is Trader Joe's, it may not have happened this year, either.

But this Lent I decided that it was just going to happen. I've been really feeling a heavy burden (and oh, please excuse how dumb this sounds, but is actually sincere) for the people of Africa. I was watching an Anderson Cooper special while I ran on the treadmill and saw several babies die of starvation in the Sudan, and their mothers walk away without even getting to bury them because they have to care for their other children.

Now I know this happens, but one of the babies they showed was the same age as my sweet boy. He was so sick that he rejected the formula they tried to feed him because he was too weak to take a bottle. I started crying, there on the treadmill, trying to sweat off my last five post-partum pounds, and it felt so strange.

So that's a roundabout way of saying that for this Lent, I'm giving up meat in solidarity with the mamas who are starving, and whose babies are starving because they can't nurse them. I'm doing the hunger walk in our town in a few weeks too as part of this, and it feels good. Obviously I can't save everybody in Africa or in Georgia or whatever, but I can pray every time I miss my too-cheap chicken or the meat that has had who-knows-what done to it before sending it to the Publix, for the mamas and the babies who do without every single day.