Awaken Your Spirit

Eight years ago I started fasting regularly as a way to make myself available to God. These fasting days and weeks have changed my life and relationship with the Lord as we’ve listened to each other, really listened. I am always humbled by God’s faithfulness to meet me in my hunger.

For so long I thought the point of fasting was to replace eating with prayer. I had done one, two and three day fasts with this objective and didn’t experience anything that compelled me to pursue this as a spiritual discipline. It wasn’t until I endured my first week long fast of no food that the veil was lifted, and my heart understood the breadth of this relational act of worship.

With Lent beginning on Wednesday, I want to share with you what God has shown me about fasting.

Our God-created bodies are beautifully designed. We are flesh and we are spirit, created to be whole. Physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually undivided. For together, they are intended to be one.

But in our fallenness, sin divides us. It compromises our wholeness and causes our spirit and flesh to hunger for separate things. Hunger is both the response of our flesh, and the urge of our spirit. The appetites of our stomach seek satisfaction, while the longings of our heart seek fulfillment.

We are a people who are continually emptied, body and soul, in need of continual replenishing. It’s the way we were created. So we would look to a provider. So we would trust him. So we would need him.

As broken people, we have learned how to supply our own needs. Instead of upward, we look inward and outward for fulfillment. And even more broken, is the reality that we don’t just feed our bodies — we indulge, we stuff, we over consume.

Truly, many of us don’t really even know what hunger is. At the first sign of it, we fill ourselves. In fact, we often satisfy body and soul out of mere anticipation of hunger. We consume food long before our stomachs need it. And we shop or veg, drink wine or eat chocolate at the first twinge of the soul’s need for filling.

These are the habits of our flesh that hinder our spiritual awareness, our connection with our Creator.

Rather than consume the manna provided by God, we find our own daily flakes that falsely satisfy. And with this man made manna we escape our struggles and avoid our feelings. It’s an easy way of not engaging our very self. Not engaging our Creator, the One who knows what we really need. All with a simple piece of chocolate. Or a trip to Target. Or a mindless episode of observing stories on a screen.

Do we not believe that He will provide? Do we doubt that His manna will be good?

This constant feeding of our flesh perpetuates the division within our very self. Our flesh was never intended to be stronger than our spirit, yet if we feed our flesh more than our spirit, we can expect this broken reality. We can expect our body to be victorious over our spirit. We can expect it to dominate, to mask our needs, to quiet our spirit, to hinder our relationship with the Father.

Fasting awakens our spirit. It’s more than a spiritual discipline. It’s a way of living. Fasting is the denying of our flesh. It’s saying no to the things we stuff ourselves with. No to that which falsely satisfies. For the purpose of seeking God. For making yourself available to him. For welcoming his redemptive work within you.

And in this denying of our flesh, our spirit becomes more alive! It awakens and sees and hears more clearly than when it’s suppressed by constant consumption.

When I fast, I consider all the ways I typically feed my flesh. The things I turn to to distract myself from pain or frustration or motherhood blues. My intention is to stop numbing my spirit by satisfying my body. So I omit these cravings of the flesh as best I can from my daily and weekly routine. I do not consume food, only liquids. I refrain from shopping and media, and I limit my social activity.

My fasting days don’t look terribly different from my normal days. But these changes alter my rhythm and force me to step outside of my immediate responses and habits in order to embrace new ones. My days are slower, more focused. I notice things — about me, about my family. The way we behave and interact.

It’s as if light is being shown into a dark room.

I sit in silence, which I rarely do. And I listen. And I pray. And I notice everything around me — the songs that are playing, the words people are speaking to me, the emotions I am feeling. I look and listen for God in all of it.

And when I open the Word, God meets me. Right there in his story, he draws me in to understand the way it speaks to my current realities. And even though I expect with genuine hope to hear from God, each time I do I am surprised. In awe, really, that he would reveal a little more of himself to me.

I hear the Lord in my hunger, in my weakness. And I’ve come to expect truthful revelations and faithful feeding by my Father during these times. In my hunger my body struggles and wants. But I let my weakness consume me so the Father’s spirit will overcome and be strong in me, dwelling more fully in this temple he’s created.

And in him you too are being built together

to become a dwelling in which God lives by his spirit.

Ephesians 2:22

May God teach us how to engage our whole person with greater intention, more surrender, and deeper embrace. May his spirit be ever awakened in you.