end of day seven

End of day seven

When I weep and fast, I must endure scorn. (Psalm 69:10)

It is the end of the seventh day of my 21 day fast. Tonight I am hungry. Not with hunger pangs, but with just the need to eat. It is natural to eat and humans are made with the natural inclination to get some food. To deny that is to go against the most basic of human needs, above shelter or safety or sex or anything. It is topmost of the needs. If you don’t do it at least some of the time, you die.

I doubt sincerely that I will die. I am a very well fed person, one of those people you see more and more today that are quite large. I am not grossly fat, but I am pretty good sized.

I still am after a week’s fasting and a few weeks on the Atkins diet, but I am smaller than I was. Which again, is not the point of the fast. The point is to get in contact with God, not lose weight. But losing weight is a side-effect of fasting. You are just going to. It is natural.

In 1997, when I fasted for 30 days, I lost around 35 pounds, maybe more. I ate for a month than my gall bladder blew up and almost killed me. Recovering from that and the botched surgery that followed, caused me to lose around 75 pounds or so. I never really weighed, but I wore a size 36 Levis at the end, smaller than I have been since the early 1970’s. of course, I found the weight again. It was hiding in the refrigerator.

But in the hunger I am beginning to feel, I also feel a closeness to God.

Today I have been feeling some renewed vigor in my work here. This has been a hard work and one with a lot of pain both for me and the church. There was a major division over control not long after I came and that hurt me and the church.

But I am beginning to see what I need to do. That was one of the reasons I went on the fast. It was mainly because of the call for the Foursquare Church to fast for 21 days, but it was also for me. I had been feeling the call of the Lord to do so for a year or more. Finally, this came along and gave me the impetus I needed.

But it is as I remember from 1997: lonely. There is a lot of comfort of sitting around the table with friends eating. When you don’t eat, you make yourself weird and set apart.

It bothers people and they begin to question why you have to do this and caution you to be careful, maybe even the suggestion that you might be sinning by going that long without eating. You might damage your body. It is not scorn, as the scripture above says, but it is a lot of skepticism. People are uneasy around others that can do or are doing what they cannot or will not. That is not an indictment, but it is true.

I point out to the skeptics that Jesus fasted for 40 days and yet did not sin. Someone else suggests that he had God helping him. But if so, how can I be like him? If he had God helping him do everything, then he was not as Hebrews 4 says, like us yet without sin. He would have been no more than a divine puppet.

So I figure if he could do it, so can I. I more than likely will not go 40 days, but, with the help of God, I will go 21. I know that it had to be a God thing for me to go the 30 days before.

He does enable us and help us. And I look to replace the desire to eat in this 21 day fast with his presence.

Father God, I ask you for strength for those who are planting churches. It is one of the hardest things someone can do, to leave that which is established and set out to a frontier of sorts, a new place with a new work. Give them strength and more of your grace and your Spirit. Bless them and their families and their churches. I thank you for what you have given me, and I thank you in advance for what you will give me in the next two weeks. I praise your name. Amen.