So, today was the first day of the month, and also the first day of my eating on only $30 for the entire month. Here’s a quick breakdown of what I ate today:

Breakfast: 1 bowl of oatmeal

Lunch: Turkey Sandwich (2 pieces of wheat bread, 1 piece of turkey) and 1 apple.

Dinner: 3 pancakes

I’d have to say that as I am writing this and getting ready for bed, I am definitely feeling hungry. Today was pretty full of temptations as well- usually on Thursday mornings I co-lead a bible-study with Dave MaGee at Winstead’s. They have excellent parfaits and blueberry pancakes. Yeah, so it was tough to watch everyone else eat and me sitting there dreaming of a parfait.

Also, at church there was a box of bagels just sitting there begging to be eaten.

The oatmeal I had this morning confirmed why it only cost $1 for the whole box. I used to think it would be hard to screw up Maple and Brown Sugar oatmeal. Apparently someone has succeeded.

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Anyway, earlier this morning I was reading a bit about prayer, and I was struck by something Pope Benedict XVI had said about it:

“It is in assenting to the will of God that the fact of our being made truly similar to God is actually effected, and we become what we are: the image of God. The confirmatory sign of this is that, at this moment, we want to act like God- that is, we want to offer his mercy to those who need it most, and we want to do so in a perfectly gratuitous way.“

I have never thought about prayer being a means of becoming like God, at least not in this manner. I guess I always think about prayer as being on my knees and asking God for things, which of course is part of it. But Benedict seems to indicate that prayer flows out of and into my assenting to follow God’s will, and the more I align my will with God’s, the more I want to do good and pray for others.

This flows into my random experience for the day:

When I was contemplating this experiment, I originally wanted to do a video-cast of it, so on Tuesday I went and bought a nice webcam for $100. Well, I tried it out and it didn’t really work as well as it claimed to work, so I decided to take it back and get a refund. Since I paid with a debit card, they had to refund me in cash, which I usually don’t like, since it means I have to take a trip to the bank.

Well, I didn’t have time to make a deposit yesterday, so it was kind of just sitting in my house all of today. I left work early to come home and work, and as I was driving by the Truman Corners shopping center, I saw a homeless man asking for money. As I was driving by I noticed another car stopped and talking to him, so I felt that I was ‘off the hook.’ As soon as that thought crossed my mind, I felt the hunger pangs in my stomach and it was as if God was slapping me in the face with the money I had sitting in my house. I realized what God wanted me to do, so I drove home, grabbed the money, turned my car around, and went back to where the homeless guy was. I stopped and gave him the money and talked with him a bit.

As I was driving home, of course I was thinking about whether he was going to blow it on alcohol or not, whether I had just thrown away $100. Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t. I then remembered these words about how as we align our wills with God, our love becomes gratuitous. I then remembered in the scriptures how God causes the rain to fall and the sun to shine on both the wicked and the good. We of course have to use discernment, but we also have to obey God.

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Anyway, Day 1 is complete, and I am tired, have a headache, and am pretty hungry. But I’m excited for tomorrow.

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