16th Day Of Lent: For My Generation

“The less time families have to prepare food or sit down at restaurants, the more convenience hovers over decisions about food, especially when there is an option that is easier. Dinner, which isn’t being cooked at home as often as it used to, is among the trend’s many casualties. Less than 60 percent of suppers served at home were actually cooked at home last year. Only 30 years ago, the percentage was closer to 75 percent.” -Roberto Ferdman, The Washington Post

I’m still not sure what it means to be a Millennial, because I’m somewhere in between a few different stereotypes within the group.

I’m a 27 year old mother of two boys, but I still feel like I’m in college.

I still feel like I’m in college, but I relate to my friends who are in their mid to late thirties.

So, I guess I’m somewhere in there.

When I read this article, though, I was pretty frustrated about it.

Every generation and every person within every generation is trying to find what they live for.

We’re all trying to claim that thing that brings us to life,

that vision or that movement or that concept that will mark our lives for generations to come.

But really? Too lazy and inconvenienced to wash a cereal bowl?

The other day I realized how hard it is for me to sit still at the table while we eat.

It’s a twenty minute meal, but I’m up and down pouring drinks and grabbing things, and when I’m done, I’m ready to get up and be about something else.

I realized that I’ve been missing it.

I want to be about more than convenience, more than hurrying through my day.

I want the work of washing my cereal bowl to be worth sitting down for ten minutes to eat it, worth a quiet few minutes in the morning to steady myself for the day ahead.

So if Lent transforms me, if it teaches me something about myself, maybe it can teach me about the generation I belong to, about the things we are doing wrong and the things we are doing right, about which crosses we’re to bear and which ones never really mattered all that much.

So while I’m sitting still at that table, or while I’m washing out that cereal bowl, I’m going to be praying,

Jesus,

make me about something,

give me a wild and holy fire

that cannot be burned out

by trends or by

generational fads

or even by my own

mistakes.

Make me about something

that both frees me from and

binds me to