40 Days Revisited

Well, I did it. Or at least I tried. I said I was going to do the 40 Acts from Stewardship, so I figured you'd like to know how I got on...

I started off better than I did last year, though I still didn't manage to do it the way it was supposed to be done. They send an email every morning, which you're supposed to read and act on; but I didn't manage that. Mainly because I don't read my emails every day - I'm doing well if I manage every 3 days. But I'm pretty sure I read them more often than I did last year - at least to start. One thing I didn't manage, though, was to put photos up; I'm really not that good at social media.

It was different from last year, which I suppose was a good thing, though not for me. I came to the conclusion part way through that it didn't really feel appropriate. I've never been good at fitting into other people's ideas, especially on a tight timescale; but the more important thing was that doing it didn't feel like it would be particularly helpful for me.

It felt like a lot of the things they were asking me to do weren't just a challenge, but pretty nearly impossible; and continuing to do things like that was just too stressful. Also, one of the things I found was that I just didn't have the resources to do some of them. It became clear that I was actually giving pretty much as much as I can, even though that isn't much in itself.

So, I guess that was one good thing that came out of it. And another was that I raised some money for a charity. Ish. What happened was that one of the first tasks was to set aside a jar, and fill it with whatever change I had during the time. I remember that about 2 weeks in, there was a suggestion that I could use that money to do something nice for someone; but, at that point, there was less than £2 in the jar. I couldn't see what I could do with that, so I decided to keep saving it. at the end of the time, there was just over £9 in there, so I sent it to Hope for Justice.

I did do better at the other challenge I set myself for Lent, which was to make an effort to look outside of myself more. By which I intended to communicate with people more, particularly those I hadn't been in touch with for a while. Mostly this was through Facebook, sending messages to people I either hadn't seen or hadn't heard from for a while, but I did actually write to a couple of people as well. Yes, that's right; write. It's not impossible to do. I also meant to get in touch with another couple of people, which I (obviously) didn't get done during Lent; but there's no reason to not do it now. So, that's one thing I will be aiming to do over the next couple of weeks.