I have to admit, giving up soda has been very very hard. I'm a big fan of carbonation in anything and throughout the week I find myself just craving the bubbly tingle of any kind of soda at all. I even love the poland springs carbonated waters (the orange one's the best!) and mineral water with bubbles. In the past fews weeks finding myself thinking "You know, I'd love to have a beer." Plain water tastes so flat and boring to me. So I've discoverd that Hawiian Punch Lite is delicious, and so is the Snapple "on the go" sugar free ice-tea packets. But still, Sundays have become my favorite day of the week because I can indulge in diet coke to my heart's content. It's probably a good thing that we're doing this, because when and if I get pregnant, I'll need to give up drinking so much soda and focus on drinking healthier options anyway.
The other thing we've been doing is praying together every night. On Ash Wednesday we picked up the Magnificat Lenten prayer book, and so we've been praying the stations of the cross (one each night) and the prayer for conversion. Praying together is the one thing we said we would do together when we got married which we really haven't. Sure, we'll do it occasionally, saying a rosary in the car or saying an Our Father before a youth group night, but we don't really have a regular prayer life together. I usually pray in the mornings when I get up. That's been my habit for several years now, and part of the reason I like to get up early, so I have time to do that. But Matt loves to sleep in, so even if I wake him up to pray with me, he's not awake and may not even remember it happened later in the day. And I never think to pray later in the day (yeah, what does that say? Apparently I've been treating prayer like brushing my teeth or washing my face - do it, get it done, and don't think about it for the rest of the day. Sorry God). So we've been praying together before we go to sleep, and it's been really nice.
The other night, we couldn't find the book. It usually gets put on the stand by the bed, but it was missing when we went to use it. We pulled back the covers on the bed, looked in the drawers, brushed aside the dust bunnies and laundry on the floor but no dice. So we wound up just kind of making up our own prayer, knowing kind of what we'd been praying so far but by no means knowing the prayers by heart. That night's station was "Jesus is laid in the tomb." We lay in bed together, Matt's arm around me, my head on his chest, and he began "They took him down from the cross, and wrapped up his cold body and put him a new grave..." I took it up, "And they were scared, and doubtful, wondering if they'd been fools to believe everything he told them..." "But his mother was there, helping them, teaching them how to pray..."
We prayed like that, and it was so different to do it this way. The prayer book was good. I am a fan of structure, always. But being forced to think it through, to pray it through in our own words and to phrase what that particular station meant to us was powerful and tender and moving in ways that I hadn't anticipated at all. I hadn't realized how much I love to hear Matt pray from his heart. It was beautiful and I was in love with him and with God all over again, and I was so glad to discover it.
Neither of us have really looked for the prayer book since. The only problem with that is that we actually don't know the stations by heart, and we find ourselves confusing stations with sorrowful mysteries. Have to look that up and prove to him I was right... ;)
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