We are so excited to introduce you to guest blogger Katie Eller today. Katie is a 4th grade teacher and graduate school student in North Carolina. You can read more from Katie at her blog, Cardigan Way.
Soon, our six dogwoods will blossom. Right now, the branches fill up with plump little buds. Entering our third spring in this house means we know what’s coming. We wait eagerly for those white blooms.
It seems so appropriate to talk about fasting in the middle of Lent, the season of preparation. Just as I look for the blooms of the dogwood, Lent has us waiting with hope for the “Alleluias” of Easter, the redemption of the Resurrection. As the 31st nears, Believers around the world are fasting and reflecting on how humanity yearned and still yearns today.
We dwell on the days before that climb up Calvary, before the empty tomb, and we ready ourselves for it to break open again.
My fasting started in January, long before Ash Wednesday. It will take me into the summer this year. And I have decided that fasting is heart-dangerous.
This is why.
After reading Jen Hatmaker’s 7 {under-the-covers-with-flashlight style, in a matter of hours}, we jumped fully into our own mutiny against excess. Well. I jumped. My husband approved my jumping from the sideline, but bless him, he doesn’t have the issue with clothes that I do.
I survived a food fast in January, coming out on the other side with the conviction that not thinking about my food is nothing short of luxury.
Then, in February, I engaged the clothes fast. It was blissful and freeing indeed. I was stunned by how inconvenient it wasn’t.
And now, we are ridding ourselves of stuff. This weekend marks the midpoint of our possessions fast. We are exing out all the extras (ironically during the month we celebrate birthdays and get stuff, I might add). My husband has joined in on this one, since really, it’s his stuff, too.
So you might think that I’m learning to fast well…getting this thing “down.”
Well, maybe it was heading that way, until the interruption of one tiny remark, one little sentence reeling me in and making me wonder where I land in all of these fasts. It was a conversation with my husband, creating the fasting details back in February, when he said to me, “Katie, it’s not a game.”
Therein lies the danger. I had allowed fasting to become a feat to conquer, a hill that I climb up, determined to stake my flag at its pinnacle.
When actually, a fast isn’t something to prove to myself or others…a danger {maybe even a greater one} when I’m living it through a blog, shamelessly taking the world through it with me and letting the “hard” become something I accomplish, something to which my legalistic-bent self says, “done.” Something not at all happening in private. And certainly not something with room for Christ, keeping myself at the head of the table, Pharisaical garb {red wedges} and all.
Fasting must be nothing like that.
Though I’m no biblical scholar, I can look at Christ’s example and tell you from scripture that fasting the way Jesus did it had nothing to do with what he gave up, as the Bible doesn’t say a word about that. Also, we’ve yet to find any evidence of Jesus coming out of the wilderness to His disciples’ congratulatory pats on the back. We don’t even read what God thought about it all.
No. Jesus fasted to commune more intently with the Father. To know God and to walk with Him. To listen and converse, worship and pray. Close fellowship with the Father {often away from the crowds} was a foundational theme in Christ’s life, and it’s certainly evident here, with the fast that inaugurated His ministry.
So how do I do this? How do I take the removal of stuff, the conviction of excess, even, and point it directly back to Christ? How do I give Him the energy of this fast {or the last one or the next one}, relinquishing it from its gamelike grip and changing it to communion with Him? How do I allow it to prepare me, to make me more like His Son and less like the Katie who loves excess?
Well. I’ll tell you. I don’t know. But it starts with recognizing the danger of it. It starts with refusing to allow it to become something I look at and say, “done.”
Whether you are fasting through Jen’s book like me, observing a Lenten fast, or even spending a season trying to grow in some area, let us not allow it to become a trite accomplishment of willpower.
Like Christ, let’s make it about communion with the Father. Dwell on Him instead. Let’s spend our fasts acknowledging Jesus, remembering how He redeemed the world by a walk up Calvary, the ultimate hill with the ultimate pinnacle at the Empty Tomb.