fisticuffs & lent

i wanted to write a quick note about lent. my family has had a weird relationship with the practice of lenten disciplines, sometimes emphasizing them and sometimes letting them slide. but in the past few years my dad has gotten a little clearer about his feelings towards them. this week he wrote this to his morning devotions email group:

A Lenten discipline is not about self-improvement, it is about improving our relationship with God. We are not trying to make ourselves more acceptable to God; we are trying to open ourselves up to the entrance of God into our lives.
In My Utmost for His Highest, Oswald Chambers writes: “The emphasis of holiness movements is apt to be that God is producing specimens of holiness to put in His museum. If you go off on this idea of personal holiness, the dead-set of your life will not be for God, but for what you call the manifestation of God in your life.”
A Lenten discipline is not a second take at a New Year’s resolution. It is not about self-improvement. While any discipline will serve to make us more aware of our desire to serve God, not all disciplines have God at the center. A discipline may have may side benefits, but no side benefit should outweigh the central aim. It is not our individual holiness which God seeks; it is a life lived as Christ would have us live.

some of you may have seen that i'm "giving up" facebook this year. i wanted to be a little clearer about that than their format allowed me to... as someone who believes that our relationship to god is displayed most beautifully in our relationships with other people, i've become more and more concerned with the way technology gets in the way of our relationships. don't get me wrong. i love the internet. i love my computer. i even love my ipod and cell phones, despite my frequent rantings. what i don't love is that even i, who loves books and letters, who remembers a time when people called their friends on their land line (the only kind of line) and just waited for a call back instead of trying their work phone, their cell phone, their email, their twitter, their house phone again (if said friend even has one), their myspace and facebook, and finally a frantic text message, who thinks facebook gives me way too much information most days, yes, even i find it difficult to have an actual face-to-face conversation. i'm more comfortable behind my monitor. that makes me sad. it makes me worried. because if i feel that way, what of the people who are growing up with these technologies, this impatience, this unwillingness to be still and know (psalm 46:10)?
so, instead of spending time on facebook, i'm going to try to rekindle real relationships. i'll be writing one piece of snail mail a day--probably mostly postcards, honestly, since i'll be preparing for and then going on my trip to germany throughout the season. some of them will be a continuation of ongoing pen-pal letter swaps (i'm lookin' at you, weinberger!), and some of them will be to people i haven't spoken with in a while (yep. got my list all made up!). i hope to also have time to write a little bit here about how the practice is going, but we'll see.