Someone recently asked me about fasting. While this will not cover everything, I hope something in this posting resonates with what I have discovered thus far that is helpful. I hope you enjoy my musing.
My limited understanding concerning fasting is for one to commune more closely to God. Praying, to me, is much the same, whereby one becomes one with God in any given situation. We may not know from doing either of these more about God’s precise will in any given case, but we can surrender ourselves to become one with him regardless of the outcomes. It’s not about escaping from the woes of this world but tapping into what can bring us better through them for his glory.
Again, at the most superficial level, fasting and prayer are not about changing any given situation per se. It is more about allowing me to be in an appropriate state before God, whereby he can be as he will and change me no matter what the situation ends up becoming. He can change it, but I prefer that he changes me so that his manifest glory fills the earth according to his will and not mine.
He is the potter. I am the clay. In fasting, I allow him to mold me into what he sees as best and then fill me as his vessel to share with others regardless of what else comes along. He reveals to me how I can change to better align myself with his revealed will.
What actions might I partake to manifest his greater goodness and glory in this present darkness as his light to this world? To me, this is what fasting answers. I can always (and often do) resist, of course, by my free will, and he then will remake even that into something else he can use to accomplish his will. He moves us all about in this manner while allowing for our free will to do otherwise and makes the “best of it” despite our many failings in opposition. He does this all in his infinite wisdom, more than readily able to endure our limited frailty to mess things up. Fasting allows me to be more in tune with his shaping of me despite events to become more like him–more like Christ, so I do not resist, but even if I do, then, he will still make something of me, and his will will be done regardless.
Long before the internet or mobile phones were widely used, I used the citizen’s band radio like many truckers do/did in the US. I would find a frequency, get on it, and speak to whoever was on that same frequency. It was nice to get on it and find directions long before map apps and GPS devices were readily available or learn about upcoming traffic flow and ways around problems. Like prayer as an ancient technique, this was one technology humankind developed for communication. Depending on the model of the radio one used (its quality and capabilities) and the antenna (it varied by design and even location), along with the traffic on that channel and outside weather conditions, the range of the ability to communicate was limited unless one added an amplifier and moved into more of the HAM radio operators’ experience.
The bigger the amplifier, the more range one could attempt to tap into theoretically. I once talked to people from Jamaica in my vehicle on a country road in North America, and amazingly they were able to hear me as the signal bounced somehow in the atmosphere, and everything was just right. This experience occurred regularly over a few weeks as I drove home from work each evening, and then it was over. Even when it did work, it did not work everyday. It was quite inconsistent. But the limitations were whatever I heard on the channel, even the static would be amplified.
Thus, all signals at the specific frequency were amplified. So I had to discern and listen carefully to pick out the person I wanted to speak from the rest of the noise (trash) in the background, often static accompanied by hisses and all sorts of other beeps and blips or screeches, etc. If it was difficult, we’d try a different frequency and often find others there in which we either joined or did not wish to disturb and moved along. Eventually, we (a friend of mine) found a channel no one else hardly used, allowing me to talk to him in the same manner frequently when we were quite a distance apart.
I see fasting as that amplifier. Whatever I am listening to, I can increase my chances of hearing it while at the same time I raise the level of all the noise in my purview. So fasting to me is improving one’s chances of listening to what one is trying to hear. In fasting, one must account for this and replace meal times with activities to reduce noise and focus on what one intends upon hearing. Fasting creates moments whereby one can commune with God by setting oneself apart to participate in his holiness.
One must use the time not to skip food merely but to cut out anything that can be cut out to give one the best chance of hearing by adding chances for such sweet fellowship. This notion conceptually could be something like less TV, more prayer and Bible reading, study, etc., or less time with friends and gadgets, etc., and more time investing in God. That same friend once asked me for advice and fasted for three days making a lousy choice because he only amplified what he was already listening to and made it more prevalent in his life sadly as he did it with an individual who was trying to persuade him to go against what he already knew to be good. His fasting made his decision more sure and resolute but not more correct. He built it up as a stronghold that he lives with those consequences to this day albeit by God’s grace.
He didn’t change a situation necessarily. He changed his position and made a wrong or poor choice against so many he trusted in the past because he “fasted” and somehow blessed it in his eyes. He deemed it God’s will simply because he fasted and that confirmed it in his heart. What happened was he allowed someone else to be his sole voice and fasted with them and listened only to them, and shut everyone else out. They stayed in the same place together, so all he heard was that voice telling him it was the right thing to do when in fact, it was the opposite.
It didn’t matter what anyone else said or even how many verses he seemed to be disregarding. He thought since he fasted three days and others had not, so he must be correct. He amplified what he wanted to hear and got “his” answer he wanted and not God’s will in the matter. That is how I have understood fasting ever since.
When praying for someone seriously ill, I believe this elevates one’s communion with God to allow for a lament to come forth more intensely and passionately. Again, the whole experience is amplified. The situation may call for more attention to focus on the essential aspects of life. Due to the high noise, one fasts by cutting out the less important to allow for the communion to be more intense when the signal seems to be fading due to the added stress and woes that need to be endured.
While one may or may not hear directly from God, one can enjoy participation with him as designed in the Bible through the lament to express oneself and “get it off one’s chest” even if it is to implore God otherwise even as one surrenders to his will when God deems “otherwise” as not an option much to one’s chagrin. This ritual then becomes an act of worship in the dialogue that may have to endure much silence to settle oneself due to the high noise being experienced that often shuts God out of one’s life. This expression alone amounts to the experience to bring some healing into one’s life and allow a respite when life becomes hard to endure. Somehow when one is thusly attune to God, he can shout in those silences as words can seem (at least to me at times) leap off the page and hit one in the heart beyond all measuring.
Songs and psalms will have new meanings that before were only endless repetitions. In this new context, they live (now being mixed with faith and not merely words to read like a child’s homework assignment) to become heroes once unsung yet formerly cherished by those walking about such fires that one will wish to climb mountains to shout them and tell the whole world of their power over this present chaos we are to tame. In the cauldron of our dreariness, God can smelt and temper us into a new weapon that will endure many a blow while affording us to make a few of our own against our enemies even as he reveals in the crucible the dross that much be removed for purity’s sake. Thus, these silences become what we desire more than life itself to be able to commune with the heavenlies rather than letting this world’s noise tempt us to dance to the wrong tune. God is able to then give us his desires as the desires of our hearts whereby his kingdom reigns over us instead of our desires in rebellion to his more perfect will. We map his desires over ours instead of putting ours atop his in full, sweet surrender.
The silences become larger than life, reaching to join in participation with the holy ones beyond this life. They become louder than life. They become one’s life. Then, one can reenter one’s life, thus transformed to bring others to the same place having emptied ourselves to be more full of him!
In such silences, one resonates with heaven’s music to meet with majestic melodies that will carry us ever above this world’s storms lifted with its winds beneath our wings as a new perspective to empower us as his embodied justice to this world’s failings. Fasting is not simply doing without. It is living without to gain what is far more fulfilling than the things of this world! God is too big to grasp that I must empty myself as Christ did in kenosis to grasp what Paul longed for in Phil 3! Jesus gave himself away to become human in his gift that only allows him to be so full of God’s Spirit that he repeats his giving back to the Father which results in the gifting of God’s Spirit. We must embody this giving of ourselves to be made more full.
My life is too full of this world’s stuff to carry much of the next into this one! Thus, I do not fast to change what will be, but who I am. I fast to become the clay pot that he can fill for a world that longs for such glories but has been blinded to accepting lesser realities! He will change the world–not me. I am merely the pot feeding the hungry his portions.
Lessening is fasting. Think about food preparation in the ancient world. It is not a TV dinner nuked in the microwave in thirty seconds. Hours doing marketing or gleaning from one’s own fields and then cutting and clipping the fresh vegetables to cook over a fire requiring wood whereby all is done manually by hand. This is after working at one’s labors in farming or livestock and whatnot on top of it throughout the day. It may require setting aside some of those activities as well to seek God.
Maybe it would include butchering an animal if one is blessed to have meat. Lots of work and very time consuming. If one were to put that same effort in seeking God, would it not yield a better relationship with God in prayer and other ways of communing with God as illustrated above? That can include also a parent who does all of this for one’s children and cleans up the whole affair and still in exhaustion seeks God out in prayer despite doing this and not eating a morsel yet feeding livestock for future meals! That can be one way in giving of oneself to God!
Fasting is not restricted to food only. That is merely the model to follow in all areas of one’s life. It is a paradigm by which to live. However, it is not a magical means to manipulate God into doing our bidding.
It is our yielding our life in bowing down in worship to do the Lord’s bidding despite the circumstances in which one finds oneself. That is true worship along the lines of Job’s message. It is emptying to be filled through yielding. Once emptied and filled thusly, God pours us out like Paul to model Jesus’s giving of his life away so that in glorification the whole earth can be full of God’s glory. We are his vessel or the very image of God for this very purpose.
