Today is the last day of 40 Days of Water! Or really, the first day of drinking whatever I want! Lent is set up to end on Easter Sunday, symbolically ushering in added joy and celebration to a Christian's best day of the year.
But I have a confession to make. (No, it's not that I drank Sprite for lunch a couple weeks ago and didn't even realize I'd broken my fast until I thought about it two days later.) My confession is that I lost the spirit of the event about halfway through.
I started with pure intentions. I wanted to teach myself about the suffering of others. I wanted to trust in God, to remind myself to pray for people who don't have access to clean water, to be more thankful for what I have.
But after a couple weeks, it mostly became a chore and a routine. I happily celebrated my feast days on Sundays, but didn't think about how the physical could lead me to the spiritual. I craved coffee and tea, but instead of using that craving to remind me of others, I simply complained.
Despite my mostly failure, I'm very glad I participated in 40 Days of Water. I will donate the money I saved by drinking water, and that is important. But even more important, I learned some stuff. I learned that fasting is an area of my life that needs work. Doing things is not valuable only if we succeed. There is knowledge in failure, and worth in failure, too.
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