Lent- A time of suffering, even if you're Six Years Old

It was the beginning of Lent, and mom had to explain to us what Lent was all about. She began, “Lent, is a time set aside when you are supposed to fast from food, only eat one small meal a day, maybe a few snacks. But the bigger purpose is to learn self-denial, sacrifice, and suffering.”

Well, that sounded okay, but there were eight of us kids and it seemed like we were always fasting. You could open the refrigerator door any day of the week, and it was so empty…. you could yodel in it and the echo would bounce across the kitchen out the front door. But somehow, mom always had something on the table at night in that one pot we owned. That pot could be filled with stew, or spaghetti or something gray, but it was always warm and filling and plenty of it. However, there was this one time, there was something in that refrigerator, and I will never forget it. My older brother, Matt, opened the refrigerator door and there in the middle of the shelf was a package from the butcher’s. I watched him pull it out, open the paper and there in the middle was a beautiful fresh mound of hamburger. I looked at him and said, “brother… you better not, I am sure that mom is going to use that for our one meal of the day!” I said it like I was a little inmate.

 
 He looked past me, searching for something to cook it in. Being that he was about eight and I was about six, we lacked culinary experience, so he reached for a fork, rolled a piece of meat into a ball, stuck it on the fork, turned on the electric stove and began to turn the fork like a little rotisserie. I watched stunned at his ingenuity. He added a few bits of salt, blew on it and slowly ate it. I looked on and was envious of his blatant rebelliousness, not to mention his cooking ability. My stomach growled. Then my younger brother came in and his stomach was growling, too. So… what do you think I did? I followed suit and created little meat balls for each of us, stuck them on forks and began to rotisserie them just like my older brother did. It smelled delicious. I handed one to my little brother. Forgetting to blow on it, we bit down and let out a yowl as our lips got burned on the red-hot tines of the fork. We spit the hamburger out, he yowled so loud, I grabbed some ice, shoved it in his mouth and whispered, “shhhh here suck on this.”  Too late, Mom came running in, took one look at the opened package of the gnawed-into hamburger and says, “what the heck are you kids up to?”  We looked up at her, with big innocent eyes and all lied in unison with our fork burnt-marked lips. “nothin.” 

I guess we had the suffering part of Lent down at least.