40 Acts

What are you doing for Lent, then? Well? I hope you are doing something, even if it's just giving up something like chocolate. I say 'just' because, although most people I know would find that quite hard (and I certainly would), it's not that difficult to figure out how to do-as long as you remember to do it. I remember once I gave up alcohol, and went out to a gig in a pub on the Friday after, and forgot until halfway through my first pint. So, I just decided to add 3 days at the end. More because I knew I could do it than anything else. Someone else I know has decided that giving up things is too hard, so this year she is going to make an effort to be thankful, and thank God for something or someone different each day. Which I think is a brilliant idea, because the point of Lent, as I see it, is to have time for reflection, to think about life and the things you take for granted.

So, I'm doing the same thing I did last year-the 40 Acts challenge from stewardship (hence the name of the post)...

                                                                                              
                                                                                                 ...which is exactly what it sounds like. Doing something different each day that you probably wouldn't normally do.
The way it works is that they send an email each day, and you do what it says-or something similar. It isn't supposed to just make you do things, but rather think about being generous, and thinking about what you do and what you could do.

Last year I found one of the biggest challenges was remembering to look at my emails every day-which I'm already doing better at. And the other main problem I had was that I just don't have much money. So it's not so much that I don't want to be generous, but that I find it difficult to do. For instance, one of the suggestions one day last year was to pay for someone to go on holiday; which, clearly, was just something I couldn't do. I can't even really imagine having enough money to be able to do that. But I did find overall that it did make me think about being generous and stretching myself a bit-which is why I'm doing it again this year.

So, what are you doing..?