I Wouldn’t Answer Me Either

“He does me double wrong that wounds me with the flatteries of his tongue.”

 

-William Shakespeare, Richard II,  (Act III, Scene II)

I think that sometimes I flatter God more than I worship Him. 

This has been a disconcerting revelation to say the least, because truly, I want to worship God as He deserves. I want to offer guileless praise without being hamstrung by self-consciousness or rendered somnolent and mute by cold heartedness. And surely, there are times that I do,—but far too often I approach God as my benefactor, or as the just adjudicator of circumstance rather than as my intimate beloved for whom I am wholly His and He is mine. It’s wrong and I know it; and I keep trying to find my way out of this mixed-up view of God. 

I will linger with a sunset until the last flash gold dissolves into purple beyond the horizon without then describing the sunset to itself and requesting that it send some work my way. I’ll draw near to the intricate unfolding petals of a flower without complimenting it for its ecstatic colours and then asking it for direction. No, in such moments I just behold the beauty for as long as I can and marvel at the God who thought up such fanciful things and gave me the ability to revel in their glory. 

Yet day after day, my prayers are more reminiscent of giving God a shortlist of my unchanging problems than they are of sitting in His presence and beholding His majesty just for the awe and wonder that such a seat affords. Instead, I feel frustrated and powerless to change any thing at all. My Benefactor isn’t cutting the cheque that will make me feel like I have a harvest in the earth. My just and righteous Judge has other files on His desk of greater importance. Prayer feels like I’m leaving a voicemail that no one wants to listen to. I know it isn’t supposed to be this way and vaguely I know the remedy has something to do with true worship, so I’ll throw in a few compliments to Almighty God hoping to soften the whole heavens-are-like-brass feeling.

Geez, when I put it like that, I wouldn’t answer me either.

Entering his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise isn’t a say-the-password scenario. The more I ponder it, the more I discover that I keep learning the same lessons over again—deeper and deeper—like drilling downwards to the core of the matter but always circling the same territory. This new life in the Kingdom of God isn’t about having correct theology or doing the right things. It is about intimacy. It is about knowing Him and being known. I don’t just want to know who God is to all Creation; or who He is to His enemies;—I want to know who He is with His beloved. The Biblical ideal for sexual intimacy is the verb “to know”. Adam knew Eve and she conceived. Not to make our relationship with God weird or anything, but the notion of an exclusive and enthralling romance that conceives new life is the picture that we’re given. Don’t blame me, blame Song of Songs.

The moment I veer wildly off-track, however, is the moment that the circumstance or problem takes preeminence over my intimacy with God;—when I vacate our dynamic of “I am my beloved’s and he is mine”. In that instant, I begin to worship my problems; mesmerized by all their complexities; lingering in their attendant anxieties. I go on and on about them with purple prose and then flatter the Lord with a few niceties and wonder why He seems so far away and disinterested. It never even occurs to me that I may have wounded Him with my inconstancy.

Intimacy is never about procurement; even of good, altruistic things that would be of benefit to others. Feigning intimacy in order to obtain something from another person is seduction. Seduction always involves deceit about the intentions of the heart. But my Beloved isn’t after feigned intimacy. He isn’t going to enable me to play the part of a spiritual gold digger, no matter how good the things that I am after are. He wants to be loved as I want to be loved. Genuinely. Unreservedly. He longs to reveal the hidden things of His personality to the one who sees His beauty and delights in Him. He’s wants an intimacy that conceives and brings forth new life. He’s just waiting for me to want it too.

A version of this article was published in the Sept/Oct edition of live magazine. Check them out here.

The Meaning in the Stone

“There is nothing new except what has been forgotten.”               

       Marie Antoinette (attributed)

This spring when my hometown was still digging itself out from under a blanket of snow, I visited some friends in Europe. Germany was already bursting out with nature’s first gold—that nearly neon green of new life budding on every branch—; a place where the weight of history is felt and seen everywhere. Castles built in the twelfth century loom over the switchbacking turns in the Rhine. Cities with cobbled streets and historic architecture retrofitted to the needs of the present bustle with the lives of its people. The new and the old; the present and the past mingled together everywhere. It’s impossible to wander through a park without encountering a moss covered monument to what has gone before. Some good events, some certainly bad—many of which I didn’t recognize or understand. 

“When your children ask their fathers in time to come, ‘What do these stones mean?’ Then you shall let your children know, ‘Israel passed over this Jordan on dry ground. For the Lord your God dried up the waters of the Jordan for you until you had passed over, so that all the people of the earth may know that the hand of the Lord is mighty, that you may fear the Lord your God forever.’” (Joshua 4:21b-24)

Perhaps one of the most powerful and perplexing abilities of the human mind is our penchant to forget. In purely material terms, we process inordinate amounts of information constantly. Paying attention, for example, to the height of a step just long enough to walk without tripping, yet forgetting almost immediately the small sign of warning about the existence of a step once our need for that information has passed. If we had fallen down and bruised a knee or twisted an ankle; we would certainly remember. We remember pain in order to avoid more of it in the future. And yet, we forget the information that prevented a potential injury in the first place. We deliberately forget; moving on to our next moment; often only remembering what has hurt us, and not what has saved us. We are contradictory creatures, ruminating on that of which we ought to let go, and abandoning what we ought not to forget. And, knowing our failing, we erect memorials for the future in order to remember the past.

Yet time weathers stone and monuments get hidden in lichen as new generations of life erode the words that would remind us what the stones mean. Always of twin purposes—a warning and a reminder. Don’t forget what you knew at this moment. Don’t forget God’s miraculous provision. Don’t forget what He spoke. Don’t forget what was revealed here. Take it with you. Witness it for a generation yet to come.

Even without monuments of stone, we each have our little ways of remembering. We write lists. We set reminders. We keep mementos as witnesses. Souvenirs—to remember. We write down events and thoughts and prayers in journals; or at least, I do. Filling notebooks with the good and the bad, the warnings and the signs, the desperate needs and the miraculous provisions. I’ll write it all down and then abandon it in a box in a closet; forgetting what I need to remember as I move on to the next moment. What good is a memorial if I forget what it showed me? What good is any of it, if I don’t take it with me? 

It is a choice for forgetfulness to dismiss the miraculous signs and denigrate God’s wonders as close calls and lucky coincidences. Why should only our bruises be honoured with remembrance while the acts of God are treated as so commonplace so as to be unworthy of recall? Questions worth asking, whether I can bear the answers or not. What have I etched in the stone of my remembrance? What do I speak when I’m not trying to be good? What do I write when I’m writing for me? Do I record God’s voice speaking to me; His miraculous provision or even our inside jokes? Or, is it only my complaining sighs as I count up my scars? 

“How long will this people despise me? And how long will they not believe in me, in spite of all the signs I have done among them?” (Numbers 14:11)

Undoubtedly, the most powerful monument is the story that I repeat to myself. The perspective from my past that informs what I believe for the future—especially about God and others and myself. And so, I’ve gone back; examined old notebooks and journals;—not so much for my own words, but rather looking for His. Tilting the pages this way and that for the holographic appearance of Jesus to be revealed in the midst of circumstances that were clouded with pain. He’s there. I just have to remember. 

This article was originally published in the May/June 2023 issue of live magazine. Check them out at baptistwomen.com

A Pebble in my Shoe

My pen hovered over the blank page in trepidation for a moment before I wrote the words in the scrawl of an inconsistent ballpoint pen.

    “Lord, is there anything You want to say to me?”

The question stared back at me blankly. I tapped the end of the pen on the miles of empty page and waited. A seemingly random word or two came to my mind;—the beginning of a sentence—not even a complete thought. I hesitated; unsure if I should write it down. Was that  God? It seemed so incredibly presumptuous to assume. What if I was wrong? What if I wasn’t?

The words come piecemeal. As though the Holy Spirit were giving dictation to a slow typer; or perhaps just a slow listener. He waits for me to write down what He’s given, before He says anything more.

I used to be jealous of Christians who had a clear sense of what God was saying to them personally. Not just a timely Bible verse that came to mind,—nothing against that, of course—but some people really seemed to talk with God instead of at Him, as I did. They would say confidently, “The Lord showed me…” “The Lord said—not audibly—,” they’d carefully caveat, before sharing a testimony of their personal relationship with Jesus. It made me jealous. After all, I was a Christian, too.  I prayed. I talked to God. Why did they have such a clear sense of Him while I usually felt like I was leaving a voicemail?

Little did I know that this niggling dissatisfaction with the status quo of my prayer life—and my hunger to have what others did—was God speaking to me already, though I couldn’t discern it. The unresolved disquiet wasn’t my soul crying out; but rather the Spirit speaking to one who wasn’t used to listening, and couldn’t discern the language. 

My hearing has gotten a little better over time, and I’ve come to recognize that God’s voice is like a pebble in my shoe. A tiny distracting thought that looms larger and larger until I fully consider it. Sometimes it is a pebble of conviction that cuts; or a warning to pause and examine. Other times it is a comforting reminder to take off my shoes because the ground I’ve wandered onto is holy.

This type of listening is unfamiliar territory. Particularly for those of us in the evangelical tradition. We want clear direction, well-enunciated, (preferably with a Scripture reference), so that we won’t make a mistake. We don’t want to have to guess. We don’t want to have to practice discerning the voice of the Holy Spirit; if practicing involves the risk of getting it wrong. We don’t want others to think we’ve wandered off into questionable realms. We want everything we hear from God to be obvious to all and approved by the majority. 

But, the thing of it is, no one else can feel a pebble in your shoe. No one else can feel the unyielding sharp stone of conviction that brings about repentance. No one else can have your personal relationship with Jesus for you.

God is like an untameable continent upon Who’s shores we arrive after passing from death to life. Certainly, one could stay on the soft sand looking backwards over the uncrossable distance by which she has come rather than venturing into the undiscovered country. And yet, some irresistible magnetism beckons in a language we’ve yet to learn to adventure into the Unknown. The Deep calls out to the deep places within us until we resolve to become pilgrims in the Wilderness of God; discerning the language of heaven.

And so, I scrawl the words of the question day after day. 

    “Lord, is there anything that you want to say to me?” 

A version of this article was published in the March/April edition of live magazine. Check them out at www.baptistwomen.com

Things I thought while walking around during a Plague

“Cosmo, I just want you to know that no matter what you do, you’re still gonna die. Okay?”

(Moonstruck)

Spring

There’s a lot of people out walking. We’re all walking for the sake of walking, moving around, one foot in front of the other, going nowhere. But the sun is shining and it’s either walk or stay inside glued to some screen, working on my terrible posture while morbidly tracking statistics. As Mark Twain (possibly) said, “There are three kinds of lies. Lies, damned lies, and statistics.” The mainstream media, social media and the self-proclaimed experts are offloading their wares in all three categories non-stop these days, but I’m not interested in buying so I head outside instead in a daily quest to get the step count into a self-satisfying range. I walk past the densely packed homes in my district and inspect my neighbours’s flower beds for plant inspiration; trying not to grow too attached to the idea of a front yard full of bosomy peonies in all their glory. I need shade plants of the sort that L.M Montgomery might have waxed poetic in one of her novels. Shy greenery and tiny winsome blooms that thrive in the whispering shadows. They are hard to find though, most people don’t bother much with trying to make things grow in inhospitable places.

I pick up my pace and reflexively glance at a my disappointing number of steps. Keep it moving, unless you want to gain the Covid-19. (Too late.) I come to the end of the houses and pass by the construction sites with newly printed signs hung on the fences warning the tradesmen to work in specific ways while under the cloud of this novel corona virus. “Novel Coronavirus”, the news anchors wearing jewel tones say it with such solemnity.

I consider titling my next book, Novel Coronavirus. Of course, I would have to start a brand new manuscript for it—none of the three works-in-progress could carry such a moniker. Search engine optimization would undoubtedly be in my favour;— for all that marketing and promotion that I am (supposed to be) doing.

The toe of my shoe catches slightly on an uneven lip in the sidewalk and I pitch forward as though shoved by a foe. I catch myself in the sudden rush of adrenalin and feel my face grow slightly warm at the thought that someone at the construction site saw me. Like that time in high school when a new pair of shoes with a thicker sole (Damn you, platform Converse trend!) caught the lip of a step and sent me sprawling up the central staircase. Arms valiantly windmilling, I caught the hand rail with both hands; hauling myself—hand over hand—up the last few steps while my legs dangled uselessly behind me. I vaguely wonder if platform Converse are still a thing as I regain my stride and keep walking as though nothing has happened. After all, I’m no teenager battling insecurity anymore. I can shake off an embarrassment. Besides, since I can’t help but laugh at physical comedy, I can hardly resent providing it for some poor soul peeking out behind the curtains. I see a lot of them these days;—people staring out their front windows, or standing in their doorway looking out on the world. It’s a strange thing to see so many people doing it. We’re all looking out the window as though we might see the end of the plague coming down the street.

I leave the construction site behind and walk past the barren lot covered with weeds still thinking about the signs on the fences. Will future people unearth these weathered metal signs in curio shops and marvel that they were hung during the scourge of COVID-19? Will they blow away the dust gathered in the intervening decades, read the public health instructions and find us quaint? Perhaps these future people will collect them as memorabilia of this bygone era; hanging them ironically around their homes. But instead of “Keep Calm and Carry On” emblazoned on everything from coffee mugs to pillow cases, and Rosie the Riveter displaying her bicep and can-do attitude; it will be the anemic messaging of “Stay Home. Stay Safe” and “Practice Social Distancing”.  Hardly the inspirational stuff of two generations ago, but maybe our fearful measures will seem endearing to the people of the future in the same way that we find leeches and blood-letting curious medical treatments of the past. “Oh, those ignorant little dears, they just did the best that they could. Like superstitious children, they were…”

Because, after all, isn’t that how we all tend to view the collective wisdom of previous generations? We assume that whatever we have attained in the present age is better than what came before it. Our attitudes are more virtuous. Our thinking more nuanced. Our societies have evolved. That’s a pet peeve of mine: the usage of the word evolved. It’s a badge to show your bona fides. You didn’t learn something. You evolved. Learning requires effort, pursuit, discernment and practice. Evolution requires nothing of the individual except a fortunate set of genes. My mind wanders backward to a bygone biology class showing Darwin’s drawing of the beaks of Galapagos finches who found the right sized seed for the times. “Darwin’s Beak” might also be a good title for a book. Maybe it could be about the way that we think we are advanced and wise when really we are just the ungratefully fortunate beneficiaries of all that came before.

My gaze falls upon the thistles that are getting along like gang-busters in the empty lot. Deep green and thriving; their stalks are thicker than my thumb as they pass the three foot mark. Those spines are more dangerous than a lot of items confiscated by airport security;—including the new tube of toothpaste I lost on my way to Vancouver a few years ago. What a different world that was. Being able to leave one place and fly to another. We didn’t even know how free we were.

But a lot of people don’t feel that way, I realize, and it shocks me. “Free” is just an abstract idea to them—and a dangerous one—whereas “safe” is the ultimate good. The sudden intrusion of government power hasn’t rankled some the way it has me. But the petty tyrants are popping up everywhere and their calls to the quarantine-related snitch lines reveal just how thin our social fabric has worn. When this plague has subsided, will it be airport security that demands passengers wear masks, or will it be the finger wagging of other passengers who demand it? I think know the answer already and it depresses me.  But maybe this madness of control will pass as fatigue with the fear of life and death begins to set in. 

I doubt it—but maybe.

Summer

I’m still walking—the same route around the empty lots and the place where the school buses are parked, lined up neatly in two long rows like yellow pills in the hands of an OCD apothecary. ‘Apothecary’ is such a fun word, while ‘pharmacist’ has had all the whimsy wrung out of it. The buses haven’t moved in months, empty of their charges, even as the playground nearby languishes in prison; blockaded behind a steel fence meant to keep everyone oh-so-safe from a virus with a 98% survival rate. I shake my head and keep moving. The thistles have bloomed spiky purple crowns and begun to die in the summer heat. The ground around them is cracked and parched and, I kid you not, tumbleweeds are rolling by me in a perfect picture of western desolation as a hot wind gusts over the face of the land. If only I had a faded cotton print dress on and a sunburned face to complete the picture. But I don’t. I put on sunscreen because I’ve been conditioned to do so by the fear of “the effects of aging”. Same, I suppose, as all the people wearing masks to keep an unseen virus at bay;— or away from other people— or to show what good people they are… It’s hard to keep track of the reasons for our measures anymore. Gone are the “wash your hands” and “don’t touch your face” instructions from mid-March. We’ve entered into some new phase of counter measures. You can feel it in the atmosphere. I think about getting a bunch of cloves of garlic on a string to wear around my neck, you know, in case this coronavirus just also happens to be a vampire.

A car passes me and the driver’s features are obscured by a swath of light blue fabric. He’s all alone in his car wearing a surgical mask and I want to ask him who he is protecting. Did he just forget to take it off? Or is that “PPE” doing a better job than the steel and glass of his car in protecting him from the danger of a COVID miasma  in case he should happen to drive through one. I could ask the black masked bicyclist who rode by too—but he wasn’t around long enough to chat.

It doesn’t really matter, though. The message is clear. Stay safe. Stay safe. Stay safe… it’s on constant repeat from the government, the businesses that have finally been allowed to open, the signs in the windows of private homes; not to mention the messages from the glitterati on their social media platforms desperate for relevancy. Stay safe.  One could be forgiven for thinking that the phrase has been trademarked and is earning cents on the dollar every time it is used in conversation.

I want to escape but there’s no where to go. Even the astronauts who left Earth’s problems behind on SpaceX’s Dragon capsule on May 30th had to come back to its shelter eventually on August 3rd. What must that be like, I wonder, to go into a hostile atmosphere that requires every ingenuity of Man in order to survive? In space, you’ll know whether your mask works or not.

I shake my head again, wishing to shed the tiresome subject like a dog shakes water from his coat. I look at the beauty of the billows of white stacking up on the horizon against Alberta’s impossibly blue August sky. The sky is bluer here than in other places. I don’t know why, but it’s true.  More so than ever before in my life, heaven is calling. This world is not my home, and I’m feeling it. There’s a row of poplars swaying their hips in breeze and somehow the fluttering of the leaves makes it seem as though time has stood still even though I’m still walking and the cars are whooshing by with snatches of their music reaching my ears. The atmosphere of the culture has been oppressive and like the summer heat that breaks into a terrific storm, I can’t help but wish for lightening to crack with a deafening boom and roar and reshuffle the deck of cards that we’re all playing with.

Autumn

The trees are shedding their gold leaf to pave the gutters and the flowers are beginning to look weary. For the first time since this juggernaut of Fear began, it feels as though something might be beginning to shift—to crack—letting the light get in a la Leonard Cohen. It’s faint and glimmering, and sometimes I can’t catch sight of it at all, but more and more the artifice feels like it is beginning to crumble. 

I breathe a sigh of relief and feel myself walking faster; walking taller as a smile spreads across my face like a wave flooding the shore. This is what I’ve been missing for months and months—the gladness of faith in the goodness of today. The leaves swish and crunch under the soles of my shoes. The air is as crisp and sweet as the first bite of the apple harvest. It has been ages since it felt like there was something to be glad about. It has been ages since I felt like singing just for the joy of it.

I’m rounding the way back toward home. The distance is shortening all the time, and as I walk along part of me wants to turn aside and add to the journey, walking further and longer because this is the day that the Lord has made for me to rejoice and be glad in it.  And, why shouldn’t I? Why rush back to a chair and the loud voices who wish to direct my thoughts and words toward their aims? I only owe my allegiance to God. He holds me in the palm of His hand and He made this day for gladness. It washes over me in a slow—bearable—realization, that this has been true for each day in this miasmic season of fear.

Only I can give place in my thoughts to desolation because this wide beautiful world wears its griefs on its face while it tells lies with pathological abandon; because mankind is a ruin of wonderful intentions. Because even the people you love and admire will disappoint, betray and misunderstand you.

So I turn aside—like Moses—to enjoy this thing that He is doing. To listen for the words that He is speaking; to keep walking wherever He leads. “Perfect love casts out fear”, and what is perfect love but God Himself?

Winter

It’s coming on Christmas but it only feels like it when the snow falls down in big flakes and gets caught in the faux fur on my hood. I’m walking in different shoes these days and taking smaller steps; shuffling along over the slippery patches with only a few adrenalin-inducing losses of balance. Animals have left their footprints in the snow as well; leaving me to muse over their tracks of differing intentions. 

Halloween’s ghoulish decorations are disappearing—though the forgotten pumpkins are getting more and more ghastly in their frigid decay on front steps. Sparkle and red is beginning to dot the city like stars appearing the the night sky as people trim up their doors for the new season with holly and pine boughs bedecked with ribbons and bows to greet all the guests we aren’t supposed to invite over. There is a perverse irony to the solemnity with which the experts and political leaders are talking of cancelling Christmas. There was another leader who felt that the coming of Christ was too dangerous, as well. King Herod the Great mandated the Slaughter of the Innocents in order to lockdown the coming of the Messiah, as it were.

All of summer’s flowers are frozen into twisted clumps of branches and twigs; denuded of their leaves and contorted by the icy breath of winter and a weight of snow. It isn’t as easy to keep walking at this temperature. There’s something about the cold that makes you feel weary. It’s the deadly deception of the frozen North: the temptation to fall asleep in the snow. The wind cuts through the folds in my clothes and my eyes begin to water. It’s hard to imagine lying in a drift and falling asleep, perhaps because the snow isn’t deep enough to be an inviting bed, but it also isn’t quite cold enough to give up yet.

Winter has a way of killing things—and it’s a good thing, too. On the insect front alone, it is a really good thing. There’s a lot of stuff that grows in the comfort of the temperate zone that needs a deep frost to wipe out. But good things die back in winter too and so it makes us afraid. I was rewatching that old series Pioneer’s Quest: A year in the Real West—where two couples lived as homesteaders in Manitoba with only the tools and means that would have been available in 1860. They built their shelters. They took care of the animals they needed to plow the land. They sowed and harvested their crops by hand. They experienced failure and had to depend on neighbours for knowledge and help. They got sick and it was scary. It was hard, hard work—and they loved it.

Besides the personal inconveniences of no indoor plumbing or toilet paper—what struck me was their focused awareness of the season. How imperative understanding the times and the seasons were for their very survival. Plant your crops too late in the spring and you’ll starve in the winter. Spring, summer and fall are the seasons of intense productivity. Winter is the season of trust; where we must believe that on the other side of all this cold and death, there will be a resurrection.

Things are coming to the surface in us all—the idols—the gods that we fear.  Whether it is fearing death from a disease, or tyranny brought in under the auspices of combatting it, or whether it is feeling virtuous for meeting all the ever-ballooning measures, or feeling justified in ignoring each instance of government overreach--idols, all. They can all be ideas that we serve with fear and trembling, without realizing that they aren’t gods at all. Fear, and its hand-maiden, Self-righteousness, must die in the cold of this season so that what is true and real remains. The homesteaders knew it back in the day, and we’re learning it again: our lives are in God’s hands—always. 

It has always been thus--; but we've forgotten it. We've come to trust in the illusion of our own control. In the prudent and responsible use of seat belts and helmets; healthy diets and good exercise; masks and hand sanitizer, and so on.  But then the Winter of Circumstance comes and destroys the illusions of our strength and betrays our truly fragile state. We may rage against it and attempt to reassert our control through the proclamation of Science™ and rule by experts, and schoolmarming one another with wagging fingers and calls to snitch lines, but the fact remains unchanged by the depths of Winter's death: we are so fragile. And, we cannot forget it. 

This awareness of our fragility presents us with a war of perspectives. To give rein to fear; seeking to return to the comfort of the illusion of our control. Or, to rest in that intangible faith that the loving Father who sent His only Son to save us carries us in the providence of His will. 

This winter is long and dark, but the resurrection is coming.  Just keep walking.

Hold (a) Fast

(A version of following article was published in the November/December of live magazine. Check them out at www.baptistwomen.com)

The shortest distance between two points may be a straight line, but the quickest way to end a conversation between Christians is to suggest a fast. No one—excepting perhaps small children with food aversions—wants to do it. The word is more likely to conjure memories of yellow lab requisition forms and having blood drawn than a divine encounter. Fasting is an old school spiritual discipline that seems out of step with the current era. Unless, of course, you’re a fitness guru chronicling your progress on Instagram—then Intermittent Fasting (IF) is all the rage. We might be willing to fast for medical necessity or physical transformation, but spiritual formation is a harder sell. We don’t know exactly what we’ll find there. Besides, fasting is optional and its effects are more intangible than Instagramable.

Though, perhaps, if our situations are particularly dire, we might consider it as a desperate Hail Mary ploy; a last ditch effort to get God to move when we have exhausted every other option. Even then, though—even when all is darkening around us—the fridge seems more comforting than the fast. The reason for this is simple, fasting removes your natural coping mechanisms so that only God remains. All the noise of life fades into the background as the near constant reminder of hunger points to the One you are seeking. Fasting is travelling a narrow path at a high altitude. Each step—each moment—requires both concentration and exertion. It’s physical effort for a spiritual result. When you think about it, there isn’t much else like it. 

And, like many of the ways of God, fasting is a paradox. It is the conscious effort of subverting physical needs for the purpose of being fed. It is a moment within a moment. A secret thing between you and God. A conversation. A communion. A snuggle under His arm for comfort and rest. It is pressing pause on all that is pressing. The meals to be made, the chores to do, and the errands to run all fade into lower resolution while the spiritual conversation comes into sharper focus. It is an exchange of priorities. It is an act of faith that agrees that, ‘Man doesn’t live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.’ We can hear those words from Jesus and trust that they are true—it is another thing to hunger to hear the Word speaking particularly to us alone

The trouble with the spiritual disciplines is that we turn them into religious duties because we do not know what they are for. We get caught up in the details— wondering if we can still have our coffee during a fast so as to avoid a caffeine headache—rather than rejoicing in the freedom being loosed in our lives. It is in the heart of God to free His people from every chain that binds, every burden that crushes with its weight, and every evil oppression that torments.  It is not His heart to tie us up with the legalistic details of when and how.

Is not the time without eating which I choose, a time to take off the chains of sin, and to take the heavy load of sin off the neck? Is it not a time to let those who suffer under a sinful power go free, and to break every load from their neck? (Isaiah 58:6 NLV)

The purpose—as always—is freedom. It is our mental gymnastics—the never ending internal monologue— that convinces us that the spiritual disciplines are about lack, rather than abundance. We fast to feast because the words proceeding from the mouth of God are better.