I STINK AT FASTING
I stink at fasting. I hate doing it. I’m not even sure what it accomplishes when I do it. Which leads me not to do it—for over a year or more sometimes. When I do fast, I’m pretty sure I don’t do it right (but is doing it right the goal?). I get hungry and headachy and begin thinking how much nicer I’d be if I wasn’t grumpy from fasting. I start thinking about how fasting seems like such a manipulative ploy to get God to answer my prayers and pay attention to me. Isn’t He always attentive? Why does He ask us to add fasting to our prayers? Aren’t prayers offered to God in the name of Jesus Christ (on a full stomach) sincere enough?
But fasting reminds me that I’m empty. My belly is empty. My hands are empty. My heart is empty. My soul is empty. Everything about me is empty without Jesus, who fills me to overflowing. Fasting reminds me that I need Jesus to fill me. Fasting isn’t for God—to get Him to pay more attention to me or to twist
His arm; fasting is for me—to get me in touch with my real emptiness apart from Jesus. My life really is empty without Him.
Ironically, I tend to think that fasting is for giants of the faith. I consign it to those men and women who are really on fire for the Lord and who have a lot more spiritual discipline than I do. But this is a lie. Fasting is for failures. Fasting is for weak men and weak women who know they are empty and who don’t have what it takes.
Fasting doesn’t have to be for days at a time. It doesn’t have to be an exercise in herculean hunger. Fasting is a physical form of prayer. And the best way to pray is how you can, not how you can’t; therefore, fast how you can, not how you can’t. Most of my fasts are a simple skipping of breakfast and lunch, broken at dinner with my family. Occasionally I will do the “36-hour-famine” kind of fast where you forego all three meals in a day and break your fast at “breakfast” the next day.
I will confess that I don’t like the 36-hour fast. It messes with me. It makes me feel the sorts of things I’d rather not encounter. Mostly I feel tempted to cheat and break my fast at dinner because I’m so stinkin’ hungry (justified by “and I don’t want to appear holier than the rest of my family who aren’t fasting”). But if I do, I feel like a failure. But if I don’t, then I face a new temptation—pride in my performance and discipline. And even if I push through and complete my fast as planned, I still wrestle with shame because it took so much effort to fast only 36 hours when other Christians fast for three days or even a week or more.
Fasting is fraught with peril.
But it is worth it. The way to avoid these feelings and temptations is not to avoid fasting. It is to believe the
Gospel while fasting. If I decide to break my fast earlier than planned, there is grace for that without feeling like a failure. If I am tempted toward pride and self-sufficiency for my successful fasting, then I remind my arrogant soul of what is real—that being full of myself is really just a synonym for being empty and that my fullness is in Jesus alone. And if I see ahead of me the saints who are hungrier for God than I am, I give thanks for them and I pray for grace to better imitate them rather than compete with them. Fasting focuses my faith.
I don’t like fasting. Like I said, I stink at it. I look forward to the Day when fasting (and faith itself) will be no more! But in the meantime, I see its purpose. I don’t understand it all, but I see how it reminds me of my emptiness and my need for Jesus. It shows me I am weak and He is strong. It keeps me connected to the reality that all I have is Christ, the Bread without which I cannot live. May God give me grace to do what feels like death so that I can have more of what truly gives me life.