I Fasted for Three Days and Nothing Happened.

I know this is supposed to be a blog about Eating, but permit me to dedicate just this one post to NOT Eating. Immediately after teaching His disciples the Lord's Prayer in Matthew 6, Jesus spends 2 verses stressing forgiveness and then the first 'next topic' words out of His mouth are "Whenever you fast". Note that He does not say if, but when. It's like every other Christian discipline; it doesn't always, but it can cause movement in the heavenlies and should be a practice that saved believers (at least) think about (at least) occasionally. 

After extended seasons of attendance at Zootown Church in Missoula and Antioch Community Church in Waco, I've come to expect a lot from fasting. I've seen my food-free peers experience supernatural healing, prophetic declaration, the works. I myself had a truly profound experience during a fast I did about a year ago. After several fasts in several different environments and seasons of my life, I expect Spiritual Awakening when I fast. So...

From sunrise on October 14th to sunset on October 16th, I did not eat any solid food.
I drank water, milk and juice.
I read the same passage every morning when I woke up and every evening before I went to sleep. (For the record, it was Psalm 119:33-40)
I attended daily prayer meetings at my church and I only listened to worship music.

And nothing circumstantially changed in my life. 

I woke up on Saturday morning in the same apartment with the same job, still hungry, still a graduate student and still unsure of how I was going to wrap up the next chapter of my thesis. There were no fireworks, no prophetic dreams, no writing in the sky and no dry fleeces in my shower. I had no visions of a museum career in Virginia, no name of my future spouse underlined in my Bible and no burning desire to be any nicer to the annoying undergrads that blared loud music last night. In fact, I'm pretty sure every emotion I felt those three days, every word I prayed and every faint whisper I may have heard from God (or imagined) were all familiar, repeated things I'd heard and felt before. Leftovers.

And somehow, the God of the Universe knew that leftovers were EXACTLY what I needed. 

I recently finished Beth Moore's 10-week study on the Book of Esther and Beth points out several times that the name of God does not appear anywhere in Esther's 10 chapters. In this way, Esther is the book of the Bible that shows us what God looks like when we cannot see Him. After the king's best man Haman sets a calendar date to destroy, kill and annihilate all the Jews in Persia, a secretly Jewish scribe named Mordecai fasts, puts on ashes and mourns at King Xerxes' gate, crying out to Yahweh to save his people. At the end of his fasting, the Jews are still not saved, but Mordecai is still certain that 'relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another place' (4:14). For three days this week, I thought about Mordecai a lot. And this morning, I was still missing a lot of the answers I wanted when I started fasting, but I have to admit, after three days of hearing nothing but familiar words of the hope and faithfulness of my Savior, I was pretty sure that He had all my questions handled.

I believe that the will of God is something we Earthlings often experience in retrospect, but rarely as foresight. As Soren Kierkegaard gloomily points out in Fear and Trembling, "Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards." We see in Scripture that the moments God revealed His will before it happened were rare and even among those few, most of them were pretty fuzzy on the details. What was absolutely NOT fuzzy was the faith of those He revealed His will to. A lot of them ended up in the Hall of Faith in Hebrews 11, but none of them got there because mountains moved and walls came tumbling down every time they decided to skip a meal. They got there because after pouring their hearts out, fasting and mourning, the silence that followed didn't slow them down.

So, if anybody out there is considering fasting, I pray that you can be content with whatever revelation God gives you or chooses to keep secret. If He told us everything we wanted to know, we wouldn't need Him, so even when we fast, He sticks to telling us what we need to know. And sometimes, all we really need to know is, Dear Heart, did you know that I love you?