Lent 2014 Day One

Lent 2014 Day One
Today is March 5, 2014, Ash Wednesday. Ash Wednesday is the first day of Lent in the Western Christian calendar, directly following Shrove Tuesday. Occurring 46 days before Easter, it is a moveable feast that can fall as early as February 4 and as late as March 10.
According to the canonical gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, Jesus Christ spent 40 days fasting in the desert, where he endured temptation by Satan.
Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of this 40-day liturgical period of prayer and fasting or abstinence. Of the 46 days until Easter, six are Sundays. As the Christian designation of Sabbath, Sundays are not included in the fasting period and are instead “feast” days during Lent.
Ash Wednesday derives its name from the practice of placing ashes (formally called The Imposition of Ashes) on the foreheads of adherents as a celebration and reminder of human mortality, and as a sign of mourning and repentance to God. The ashes used are typically gathered from the burning of the palms from the previous year’s Palm Sunday.
That is the Wikipedia version. But I figured if Jesus could spend 40 days in the wilderness, no GPS, no cable TV, no Net flicks, no McDonald’s, and then I could write a page every day. I mean He was out there getting tempted by Satan. So here it goes.
Contrary to what my cousins used to say, the ashes are not derived from the priests and nuns smoking cigars.
Each day until Easter, I will sit and write something that fills one horizontal 8×10 sheet. If you watch The Big Bang Theory, you see that the creator of the series, Chuck Lorre, ends each program with a single par graphical page. That is where I got the idea.
So meatless today – Ash Wednesday and all Fridays, writing one page per day. I pretty much have the abstinence part covered.