Actions 9 & 10 &11

When you manage to slip up on one of these 'do-it-every-day' resolutions, it gets easier and easier to just let it go. (Believe me, that has been my course of action in virtually every diet I've embarked upon...) But, here I am, ten days into Lent, 3 days behind, and trying to catch up because I know that I will be missing quite a few entries later in the season. It's inevitable.

Do someone else's chore. Buy a few $5 fast food gift cards to give to homeless people you encounter. Call an old friend. Certainly, this is an assortment of divergent activities--and I'm not so sure that any of them will move me any further along the path to Easter.

I've been doing someone else's chores for as long as I can remember; maybe not purposefully, as this action-item suggests, but most definitely. It almost seems to have come with the territory of being a wife and mother, a teacher or holder of any other kind of service role. Pick up the slack. Get things done. Don't rely on people doing what they say they'll do because you're bound to be disappointed. Do it yourself.

And those fast food gift cards. I make sandwiches for the homeless every month or so, that are distributed by one of the many organizations that try to help--but I don't really encounter homeless people that often. And I would wonder how, if they are homeless and without resources,  they would get to a McDonalds to cash those cards in. This doesn't seem a satisfactory effort to me.

Calling an old friend seems more like a reward than an improvement suggestion. Maybe I am just being curmudgeonly today, but I find myself arguing with the creator of these actions, at least on this week's incarnations thereof.

Instead of bustling around buying coupons and silently assuming responsibilities that aren't mine, instead of interrupting someone's day to indulge my own Lent-listed action item, perhaps I should stop excusing myself from my own chores, and should do the laundry, mop the kitchen floor, take the junk to the dump, and deliver on the many and varied promises I've made to assorted people for their projects. Clear the decks, as it were, and be the personification of all those good intentions. Number one on the list: catch up on the Lenten action items. Well, yes, sort of.

[Tomorrow: Pray the paper (pray for people and situations in the news..]