Tweeting or Eating?: What People Are Giving Up For Lent in 2012

A recent Christianity Today article shows the top 100 things people gave up for Lent this year according to their Twitter feed. Number one on the list: Twitter. But although about 23,000 people are giving up Twitter and Facebook according to the Twitter-sphere, when you break down the data by category the picture becomes much clearer. While the world continues to change, social media outlets keep expanding, and newly developed and destructive fascinations creep into our daily lives, almost 80,000 tweets this year said that its sender will give up something that people have been giving up for centuries:

Food.

Pithy Post: When the Ashes are Washed Away

On Ash Wednesday, and during the whole season of Lent, Christians around the world remember their mortality. Today, many of us remember it by putting ashes on our foreheads. It evokes that famous passage in the Bible:

For dust you are

and to dust you will return.

(Gen 3:19)

We remember intentionally and communally what we all know personally each time we lose a loved one. Our world is broken, we are broken, and we will break.

But are Christians just a bunch of morbid mood killers? No. We sit in the reality of our ashes so that we can fully celebrate it when Christ washes them away. Lent ends with Holy Week! Lent ends with Jesus taking on our mortality, donning our ashes for us, dying on the cross, and then raising from the dead on Easter day. Lent ends with Jesus washing away our ashes in the cleansing water of baptism.

Lent ends.

NPR: Excuse Me, You Have Something On Your Forehead