Lent

I know that as Mormons we don't celebrate Lent.  But I have always wanted too.  I am kind of a sucker for self denial and constantly striving to find ways to continue to perfect myself.  I understand the concept of Lent is flawed.  If there is something in your life that you should give up - you should give it up forever, not just for a few weeks.  However, it has always appealed to me as a way of "testing the waters" of my weaknesses and seeing what I really can go with out.

Well this year I decided I really wanted to give it a try.  I have a good friend a few houses down from me who is a strong Catholic and she was trying to come up with something to do for Lent - and it was the motivation I needed to come up with something myself.  I had a few things on my mind that I wanted to try going with out and as my mind began to ponder them the Spirit told me almost instantly what I needed to give up... Facebook.  I get the most important Facebook things sent to my email (posts from the groups I am in, posts I am tagged in, etc) - the rest are just time fillers - and honestly I don't have a lot of time I need filled.

I do like Facebook to see what is going on in the lives of people I truly love - but don't see or talk to as much as I like - and when it comes to using Facebook this way I do not have any problem with it being in my life.  And the truth is I don't spend too much time on Facebook.  I don't have a smart phone, tablet, or laptop - so it is only when I am up on our desktop computer - so in all reality it is only for maybe for 5 - 10 minutes a couple of times a day.  But the REAL problem with Facebook was the articles that I was reading.

I have several very smart, educated, spiritual, intelligent, informed, thoughtful friends from all walks of life who "like" and "share" all sorts of interesting articles... and ones not so interesting.  But I wanted to read them all, and in the end - most were not uplifting and left me in a depressed mood.  I had noticed that it was really starting to get to me a few weeks ago - all the articles about the church, and feminism, and 50 Shades of Grey, and apostasy, and mommy-wars, and modesty, and politics, and, and, and.  It was TOO much.  Too much to think about, too much to read about, too much to try to fix.  They were like weights weighing me down. I tried to make a goal to just not READ them, but many of them are about topics I care about and want to be informed about - but even just the titles themselves led my brain down paths that I either didn't have time for or places that I didn't wanted to be.  Even the uplifting ones I found didn't really uplift me and in the end I knew I would be more "uplifted" by reading my scriptures or a good old conference talk.

So in the end I decided to give up Facebook for Lent.  And so far - it's been great.