A Beginner’s Guide to Fasting
Several years ago my mother-in-law died. It wasn’t sudden. It wasn’t a surprise. It involved a more-than-month-long stay in the hospital. There were good days. There were bad days. Those of us that kept vigil in the ICU those last days with her lost track of time. Some times we forgot to eat. We weren’t fasting on purpose. We simply found ourselves in a space where eating wasn’t the most important thing. And this, I think, is elemental to the rich spiritual discipline of fasting.
Fasting is hard. Time goes anything but fast when you’re not eating. Snickers has that ad campaign, “You’re not you when you’re hungry.” And there’s some truth in that. But perhaps some times the opposite is true. Perhaps our truest natures come out when we’re hungry, when our untended appetites start reacting, when we’re jolted out of our slothful contentment. Fasting isn’t fun, and it’s not supposed to be. Fasting wrenches us out of our comfort zone, making us face uncomfortable truths about ourselves and the world around us.
Maybe Snickers has it wrong. Maybe we are most authentically ourselves when we’re hungry.
Fasting is often associated with the season of Lent. During Lent, we read from Isaiah 58 (which shows how we can fast and miss the point) and Matthew 6 (where Jesus says “when your fast…,” and not “if you find it convenient to fast…”). We give up everything from chocolate to social media all in the name of feeling good about our spirituality. More often than not, we talk about fasting like it’s religion’s answer to New Year’s resolutions.
But the Bible paints a very different picture of the spiritual discipline of fasting than our modern conversation and practice.
Fasting engages our body in worship.
Any time we find ourselves slipping into the idea that only spiritual things are valuable while the physical world doesn’t matter, the practice of fasting reminds us that our bodies matter. God made our physical bodies. And God made us with a rhythm of hunger and satiation.
Fasting also calls us to humility, reminding us that God is God and we are not. Food is one way we receive God’s sovereignty. As the psalmist prays, “When you open your hand, you satisfy the hunger and thirst of every living thing.”
Fasting isn’t a means to an end. This is crucial. We don’t do it in order to get something out of God. Fasting isn’t a way of rubbing the magic lamp so the Holy Spirit genie pops out to give us three wishes. Certainly, something happens when we fast, and we change when we fast, but we don’t fast because of the results. Fasting is not for manipulating God.
Fasting invites us into solidarity with those suffering.
North American Christianity leans toward the triumphal. We really like the victory of the resurrection. We like the cross when it reminds that our sin is forgiven. We don’t so much like the cross as a reminder of the God who suffered and died. Such triumphalism keeps us oblivious to those who suffer in our communities—the poor, the hungry, those in prison, the displaced, all those who don’t enjoy the same privileges and creature comforts we take for granted.
Fasting helps us remember the hungry in our midst. I live in a state where 1 in 3 adults are obese. Meanwhile, in the very same state, 1 in 4 children rely on government assistance to have enough to eat. The number of undernourished people in the world increased from 777 million to 815 million last year. Fasting invites me to humble myself and enter into that pain and suffering of my neighbors next door and around the world. It helps me see the injustice that the poor experience.
Fasting is about grief and lament.
“Fasting is the natural, inevitable response of a person to a grievous sacred moment in life,” writes Scot McKnight in his book Fasting. What he’s writing about is what I experienced when my wife’s mother passed away. When grief punches us in the face, fasting is natural.
Every example of people fasting in the biblical story is a response to grief. The very first mention of fasting in the Bible is David’s response to his stillborn child after the incident with Bathsheba. Ezra calls a fast among the exiles as they begin their journey home as an act of humility and repentance. Esther calls her cousin to fast when her life is in danger.
Fasting is one way we can lament over everything wrong in our world. School shootings, racial conflict, corrupt politicians—all of these lead us to cry out, “How long, O Lord, how long?” We can fast as a response to the injustice that we see in our neighborhoods.
Fasting is about food.
Fasting in the Bible is always about food. Fasting isn’t hyper-spiritualized New Year’s resolutions. We don’t fast from sin. We repent from sin and stop doing it. It may be healthy for us to give up things like social media or TV, but perhaps we would do well to call that “abstinence” rather than “fasting.”
Steps to start fasting.
1. Keep it simple. Don’t go from a 2,000-calorie day diet to a 40-day fast. Start small. It doesn’t even have to be 24 hours. John Wesley’s first Methodist communities fasted from breakfast and lunch every Wednesday and Friday. They would break their fast with something small and light around 4 in the afternoon.
2. Drink plenty of water. You won’t die from going a day or two without food, regardless of how much your stomach growls. You can do damage to your body if you go for an extended time without drinking.
3. Use your hunger pangs as a prompt for prayer. When your appetite creeps up, direct your attention to God rather than the vending machine. Pray “God, make me hungry for you” or “God, make me hungry for justice in the neighborhood.”
4. Redeem the time and money you would spend on eating. Take that money you would have spent on that fast food lunch and give it to a church or charity or non-profit involved in hunger prevention. Take that lunch hour and volunteer with that place.
5. Don’t talk about it. This sounds obvious, but how many of us announce our Lenten fast on Facebook, especially if it’s giving up social media? Just don’t make a big deal of it. Fasting is between you and God.
“Food doesn’t sustain us. God sustains us,” writes Richard Foster. Fasting isn’t the end. There are no prizes for who can fast the best or longest. Fasting is always paired with feasting. The Lenten fast is 40 days. The Easter feast is 50. The feast is always great than the fast. Fasting doesn’t make us holy. It’s God who makes us holy as we submit through the discipline of fasting.
If you’d like to dig deeper about fasting, be sure to check out Fasting by Scot McKnight and Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster.