In case you’re not already aware, Lent begins today. Lent is a solemn season of fasting (abstaining from something, traditionally food) that is modeled after Jesus’ 40 day fast in the wilderness.

Lent is practiced in many churches and often looks different for different traditions, but the idea of giving up something in order to spend more time seeking God is fairly common.

I think that it can be especially beneficial to give up something that is or has the potential of becoming an idol to you. An idol is anything that takes the place of God as first in your life.

A while back I gave up working on a web project because it was consuming me. It consumed my time, my thoughts, so I stepped back from it for a week.

For Lent this year I am giving up seeking out new Twitter followers. I’ve been on a quest for the past few months to gain followers, and while I have been able to use this expanded reach for some good purposes, it does have the potential to become all about self-promotion and my ego, about self-worship.

For the sake of honesty, I should mention that there are a few ways that I work on gaining followers, and one of them in particular is what I plan to quit. Not sure about the others yet.

Are you fasting anything up for Lent? Why are you giving it up?

I’m fasting this week, not food or TV or beer or even the computer. I’m abstaining from work on one of my websites. I’ve got a site that most of you reading this already know about, PolFeeds. It syndicates news from Congress, the President, and the Presidential Campaigns, and with the election heating up, I’ve been working hard to promote the site.

I’ve got a lot of sweat equity in this thing. I’ve spent tens if not hundreds of hours building and growing it. In other words, it is important to me, but I realized that for the past week it has been consuming my life, taking me away from time with God. So I need to put it down for a while, to refocus. I’ll still be blogging. And I’ve got some other projects that I need to work on, but as difficult as it is (especially now when the opportunity for growth is so great), I’ve got to let this one go for a few days so that it doesn’t become my God.