To Fast or Not to Fast

So our pastor is encouraging the entire congregation to take part in a season of fasting. Sounds like no big deal right? Wrong! I've looked over the fasting schedule and sure it sounds easy enough, but continue reading and you'll see that before it's all over you'll have completed a total of 85 days of fasting and 40 of those days are consecutive! I really want to be a team player, but that just sounds impossible to me. Especially after giving it a try for just one day.

Last week I did a one day partial fast...meaning I went from dinner one night to dinner the next night. It was painful - literally. My stomach was in agony. I'm such a wimp. But I'm really glad I did it and I did spend most of the day in constant prayer because I could barely function due to the agonizing hunger pains. And of course I continually thought about the people all over the world who suffer hunger pains on a daily basis. Again, I'm such a wimp.

An interesting conversation did happen at the dinner table when I finally broke my fast. I hadn't told the kids I was fasting until we sat down to eat that night. I explained to them what it was and why we fast. I was telling them that a pretty cool thing happened while having my devotions that morning. I've been reading in Mark and the passage for that day was the story about the disciples who were trying to cast out a demon from a boy and they couldn't do it. So Jesus came and took care of that pesky spirit. Later the disciples asked Jesus why they couldn't cast it out and he told them that some can only be driven out with prayer and fasting. "Isnt' that amazing?", I said. "The day I was fasting the scripture for my devotions was about fasting!" To which boy wonder replied in that what-did-you-expect kind of voice, "Well yeah, it's a God thing." duh.

I'm going to continue fasting one day a week and maybe work up to 3 days of partial fasting. I want to stretch in my walk with Jesus and this is an area I have always pretty much avoided, not because I'm a food-aholic, I'm extremely disciplined when it comes to food. So why have I avoided fasting? Maybe it's because I don't like discomfort. If that's the case, maybe vowing to sleep on the floor for 40 days would be just as difficult and I bet most of the world sleeps on a hard surface every night, so it correlates. Hmmm...I'm actually not sure which would be more difficult, 40 days of fasting or 40 days of sleeping on the floor. I'll have to sleep on that one and get back to ya.