Of Girl Scout cooking and Lent
By David Myers
You know, Girl
Scouts really ought to change their cookie season to a different time of year.
They’re not making Lent any easier.
It has been a
strange few weeks. After seven years with the same newspaper layout program, we
recently upgraded. Learning a new computer program feels a bit like when you
first wake up from major surgery. Two weeks later and I’m still in a haze. I’m
afraid to make any sudden moves for fear I’ll send the entire issue into
computer oblivion.
Making matters
worse is the fact that after purchasing the program we realized that it
wouldn’t run on my older office computer, so we had to order a new one. With my
old computer in pieces and with no access to my files, I was forced to load the
new program temporarily onto my home computer.
So, here I sit, at
home more than a week now, having heard a phrase I never imagined as a child
that I would ever hear: “Your memory is on back order.” I hope that if I hear
that phrase again when I’m 75, it will indicate a medical procedure, because
I’m sure I’ll need it.
What
was I talking about? Oh, yeah, the computer. Having said the above, I ask your
patience as I learn the new program. The photos may not look up to par, and
there may be a few graphic booboos (If you’re really bored, you could make a
game of it: Find the Graphic Booboo.). I might as well blame any typos in my
articles on the new program, too. On second thought, I can’t blame the program
for typos. If you see a typo, blame … um … Wink Martindale. (Blame is one of
the leading causes of sleeplessness, and I need as much beauty sleep as I can
get.)
With this season of
Lent upon us, the hardest part of working at home is trying to keep from
running into the kitchen for another Girl Scout cookie every few minutes. I’ve
got nine boxes. Nine! Can you say “no” when a Girl Scout comes selling cookies?
I can’t. Three times I couldn’t. And why do I always have to order three boxes?
I wonder how many calories are in nine boxes of Girl Scout cookies?
It was Ash
Wednesday when I brought home from my office the last three boxes of Girl Scout
cookies, delivered a few days earlier by Tim Wenzl’s
daughter, Shannon. Which meant that on Ash Wednesday, as I
sat at my home computer, the ash on my forehead reminding me of this sacred
season, visions of “All Abouts,” “Thin Mints,”
“Little Brownies,” and “Carthweels” danced in my
head. On the most important fasting day of the year, a cornucopia of
chocolaty, wafery, minty
goodness sat temptingly just 11 steps away.
When your average
Joe (of which I am one) thinks of Lent, one of the first thoughts that comes to
mind is of fasting, which I think is kind of … well, it’s kind of selling the
season short. It simplifies it into a time of sacrifice, when that’s just one
ingredient.
And if you’re that
average Joe like me, you will occasionally find yourself setting a Lenten
“resolution” with an ulterior motive. For example, I really did decide I would
eat less overall this Lenten season. Of course, this has nothing to do with the
fact that my next cardiologist exam is coming up, and I need to improve my
cholesterol, lest I earn the doctor’s wrath. You don’t want to mess with the
guy who prescribes your heart medication.
Lent
is about becoming closer to God, and if you’re like me, when you can’t see God
right in front of you, you tend to put off looking. After all, God doesn’t live
in your garage! It’s too dirty – all those oil stains and mouse turds. And he certainly doesn’t exist at your place of
work. I mean, why would he? It’s work after all!
So, what is Lent
all about? In a sense, Lent is about receiving. We fast and give up certain
foods on certain days so we can revive in our hearts the good news of Christ’s
victory over sin, and of his great sacrifice for us.
We give up watching an hour or two of TV a day so we can have more time to
serve those in need, or simply to help a friend, thus receiving the high that
comes from having lent a hand. It’s about giving money otherwise spent on
goodies to the poor. It’s about trading physical pleasure for spiritual
treasure.
It’s not so much
about searching for God in the extraordinary, after
all, we already know he resides there. We see him in the sunrise, in the oceans
of wheat, and in extraordinary acts of giving.
But how often do we
search for him in the ordinary? God is at the office; he’s in the
garage. For that matter, he’s in those little mice.
Lent is about
getting a little help through confession, that soul cleansing moment when you
can wash those sins right out of your hair. It’s in attending the soul
satisfying Word Working sessions the bishop has been writing about.
And when we
experience those “God moments” -- as Sister Rose Mary Stein described them --
in the ordinary everyday … talk about receiving joy!
You may be
wondering how I did on Ash Wednesday. Well, I could have done better ... I
should have done better. But I also know that eight boxes of Girl Scout cookies
will be going to the Friendship Feast “soup kitchen” in