day 7 Fasting

Im conflicted about this blog because its about fasting - which is something we are supposed to do but not talk about.  And its partly about a person, who I dont want to expose.  But the distance of time and the fact that none of you will know this person hopefully make that OK.  

I had a friend who had an eating disorder. She loved Jesus but somehow, somewhere a lie started to whisper to her that she might become fat and that this would be something terrible and awful and unbearable.  She was, of course, wafer thin. There had been months of minimal eating and of wearing baggy clothes before anyone really noticed, by which time the whispering lies had been shouting for a while and were drowning out the Truth.  Its very hard to understand. Even harder to try to engage with and pray for.

  

When I found out about what she was going through I committed to pray - which is not something I do very often. I knew it would probably be a long haul.  I felt God say ' man does not live by bread alone'  - which seemed counterintuitive because bread was exactly what my friend needed! But God seemed to be saying that actually this issue was not one of food. It was a spiritual battle with the father of lies.  God's word of Truth is what sets people free.  I felt that I should be fasting whilst she was refusing to eat. Two identical actions with entirely opposite motivations.  The first fast was for 10 days. Which might seem a long time to most people but which isn't actually that hard for me once Ive got past the first couple of days.  Fasting on behalf someone who is not eating is interesting.  You realise that it doesn't take long for your body to adjust to having no food.  You dont feel hungry after a while.  I started to see how an eating disorder can take hold.  I was also thinking about the people in famine stricken places of the world - particularly the parents who are without food for their kids. I dont know about you but I take food pretty much for granted. When you change your eating habits, for whatever reason, you start to see things differently.

The 10 day fast definitely made me feel a lot more spiritually switched on and tuned in.    And I clearly remember on breaking that fast, as I sat down to eat I suddenly became aware of how incredibly blessed I am to have food to eat and that I could make a choice whether to have it or not.  I definitely prayed before tucking in.  I so rarely do that and if I do its a 'rote' grace when we have visitors just in case they usually do it so we dont offend. ( Im not the only one who does that , right? 😊)

This Lent our church are asking us to fast and pray. We are in the middle of a week of prayer and are joining together on Wednesday to fast. Its a good thing to do and Im not sure why but recently Ive been more and more convinced that it achieves something much more than we can comprehend.  I think it has something to do with it being utterly unfathomable to the enemy. Satan is supremely selfish and any act of sacrifice is ridiculous to him.  But of course sacrifice is the DNA of Jesus.  Fasting out of love for Jesus and His mission and His people is an act of defiance and warfare. It accomplishes things. Sometimes we dont see what it is accomplishing right away. But I believe fasting turbo-charges our prayers and helps to hide them from the enemy.   There were some really amazing answers to prayer for my eating disordered friend.  It took much work and many people praying and her own amazing courage to get her free.

I wonder how many meals a day Adam and Eve ate. Ill bet it wasnt 3.  I suspect they ate when they felt hungry and picked fruit and berries off the trees as they walked in the garden with God in the cool of the day.  Food wasn't an issue or a problem for them ....... until of course it was.  And ever since then human beings seem to have had a strained relationship with food.  Either not enough of it, or fighting wars over possession of it, or, more recently, over indulgence and abuse of it.  What's your relationship with food like?  Have you submitted your appetite and habits to Jesus?  What would it look like if He did your supermarket shop and your meal planning?

Just wondering.