Happy Mardi Gras!
You just read French.
Mardi Gras translates to Fat Tuesday. That’s today!
Fat Tuesday is a day of feasting before Lent starts. Church youth groups eat piles of pancakes. Others toss beads and guzzle booze on Bourbon Street.
Whatever you inhale — flapjacks or king cake ale — is meant to be a final hoorah before Lent, the Church’s 40-day season of fasting that starts on Ash Wednesday and ends on Easter.
PSA: When you notice smudges on people’s foreheads tomorrow, remember it’s an act of religious observance. You didn’t miss national clean your chimney day.
Regardless of your religious affiliation, there are lessons you can learn from the Lenten season.
Subtraction helps you cherish
In an age of instant gratification and dopamine addiction, we’ve forgotten how to savor.
We’re more likely to consume than cherish. A habit of consuming leads us to expect good things rather than be grateful for them.
And the result is a life ruled by desires, not discipline.
A life chasing every desire may create fun experiences, but it usually doesn’t lead to sustained fulfillment.
Lent is a 40-day exercise in fasting from your desires so they don’t rule you. So you can cherish life rather than consume it.
Christians like myself will tell you Lent helps me increase my dependency on God. All it takes is a few days without sweets or tv to reveal how reliant I’ve become on things without substance.
In his space trilogy, C.S. Lewis said, “Perhaps the experience had been so complete that repetition would be vulgarity — like asking to hear the same symphony twice in a day.”
Maybe the symphony of life would sound sweeter if we cut out some noise.
I don’t want to miss out on the richness of life because I’ve normalized experiences through expectations and repetition.
Lent provides an opportunity to cut something from your life so you can grow discipline and depend on things that matter.
Hard things are easier in community
Shared challenges create stronger communities.
I’m more likely to stick with a commitment when I know millions of others are in the arena with me.
And while individualism brings external praise, communal living brings inner richness.
Lent is an opportunity to join millions of others in doing something hard so you can grow together and share the reward on the other side. Nobody wants to celebrate a championship in a locker room alone.
For Christians, Easter is the reward on the other side. And the celebration looks like feasting.
✌️
— Luke
P.S. If you’re curious about Lent, my church created a 40-day devotional. The first couple pages gives you a background on the practice. And yours truly had the honor of writing one of the days (pg. 31). Check it out here.