Jessie: Struggling with Unreasonable Expectations

From Jessie Dye, Earth Ministry's Progam and Outreach Director

Struggling Giving up Cows for Lent seemed so easy and so cool when I started planning it. Then the blog idea came up for us at Earth Ministry and we developed a great, spiritual esprit d'corps. Now I'm struggling, with the actual Lenten fast and especially with my own unreasonable expectations. They are:

* I'm not as good as Deanna, because she's giving up driving. Cows are so easy to give up as compared to not driving.

* I'm too old to have to do this (or too young, or too busy, or not spiritual enough).

* I'm doing it for the wrong reason-to lose weight not to connect to my core or for the environment.

* Milk is my habit. How can I not have cream in my coffee? This is too hard.

* Just CHEAT.

But I'm doing it anyway, "keeping the faith", as we would have said in my youth. And maybe that's what it is, really, keeping the faith. It's not that hard, as a practice, to give up Cows; it's only a change of habit and a slight inconvenience. I grieve because if this is so hard for me, a committed environmentalist taking this step during the sacred season of Lent, how is our culture as a whole going to step away from mass consumption and back to our true nature as Children of God? In the end, I think I may have the entitled-consumption disease as badly as the next person. Maybe the concept behind Lent is to heal us of self-righteousness.

God help me!