Unplugged

Most of my family, including myself, are sick. Really sick. I've been fighting a cold for almost a week now and each day I feel worse than the day before. Joel woke up screaming last night at midnight. He was holding his ear and saying, "Owie! , Owie!" I gave him some Advil. When we got up this morning, his ear was draining. Poor baby. I took him to the doctor's instead of going to Bible study.

When I got home, I had two men to feed (septic tank workers), a messy house and enough "to do/to be at" items on the rest of this week's docket to make me weak in the knees. After changing messy diapers and getting things relatively squared away around the house, I settled down for a much-needed quiet time. I slept hard for and more than an hour.

When I awoke, I glanced at the clock and realized it was time for Rachael Ray to start cooking. "After a day like today," I thought to myself, "I need a little t.v." I pushed in the power button. Nothing was on the screen except white snow--on every channel. Oh yeah. How quickly I had forgotten my lofty Lenten idea--giving up t.v. Matt's been wanting to pull the plug on the t.v. for a very long time. I still wanted the option of watching Rachael Ray cook and seeing the big eyes of the big winners on Antiques Roadshow. Matt thinks most all the t.v. programs these days have "very little redeeming value." I agree, but I still wanted the "just in case I'm sick or I have 3 littles all by myself" option of watching the tube. Kind of like the "security" of holding on to that one last credit card.

I talked to a friend this past weekend at a mother/daughter retreat that Gracie and I attended. She said her family had finally taken the plunge and "unplugged." She said her kids were more content and her home was, in general, "much more peaceful." Sunday morning while I sat in church it came to me, "Turn off the t.v. for Lent." I told Matt last night he could turn off the t.v. if he wanted. I thought he would do it after Ash Wednesday services tonight. I thought, "On the way home from church, he'll probably explain to the kids that we've made the decision to 'unplug'."

This afternoon's vain attempt to get a t.v. fix was a deja vu moment. Five years ago, I told Matt the Lord had told me we were to get rid of cable t.v. (something he had wanted to do for a long time). I was in my first trimester with Lydia and horribly sick. I called Matt that day at work and asked him why the t.v. wasn't working. "You told me to cancel cable," he said. I literally pitched a fit. "I meant AFTER I was feeling better! How do you expect me to get through this pregnancy without the Food Network or HGTV?"

"And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into hell." Mark 9:47

This afternoon I read about a homeschool mom who keeps a spiral bound journal open in a public area in her home. She and her kids write down little "graces" the Lord shows them throughout the day--a way to cultivate gratefulness. So I decided that I would replace the t.v. with a journal, a journal of gratefulness for the abundance the Lord shows us each and every day. My first entry will be "Thank you for a red-haired girl practicing her piano so diligently."

(For those of you wondering, we will still have DVDs to watch, but this will force us to be more disciplined and choosy about our t.v. watching. For my part, I doubt I'll have any great desire to watch another episode of "Daniel Boone" :)