Hunger Is An Address, Not An Achievement

She did not tell anybody, and she has thought about that a great deal since, because of what she did instead.

She went without something for a stretch of days. What it was and for how long is nobody's business and it is not going on this page. What matters is that she did it quietly and told no one, exactly the way she had been taught, and she was rather pleased with herself for the not telling.

And then she caught herself, on the third morning, doing a thing she has done all her life. She was rating it.

Not out loud. Never out loud. But there was a running commentary going on somewhere behind her eyes about how it was proceeding, whether it was going better than the last time, whether she was being properly serious about it, and how it would compare with what other people at that church would probably manage.

There was no audience in the room. She had built one anyway.

She has prayed about this and about everything else. She prays out loud in front of hundreds of people and she prays in a car with nobody, and she is not a woman who is shy with God or with anybody.

And a friend she trusts said, kindly, over coffee: have you thought about fasting for that thing?

And what went through her was not hope. It was the commentary starting up again. Here was something else that could be done well.

If there is a scoreboard behind your eyes that nobody else can see, come and sit here in the sun a while.

Jesus put this somewhere very specific

Let us go straight to the passage, because He is unusually direct about it.

That thou appear not unto men to fast, but unto thy Father which is in secret: and thy Father, which seeth in secret, shall reward thee openly.Matthew 6:18

Look at what He is protecting.

He is not laying down a rule about privacy for the sake of modesty. He is guarding the direction the thing is aimed in. The moment there is an audience, the whole business turns around and faces the wrong way, and He knows exactly how quickly that happens because He knows what people are.

And notice the audience He names instead. Your Father, which seeth in secret. Not a technique observed correctly. A Person, looking, in a room with nobody else in it.

You are seen by the One this was always addressed to, and you have been the whole time. I am not saying that to be encouraging to somebody who caught herself keeping score: it is exactly what Jesus says the secrecy is for (Matthew 6:18), and it is the Holy Spirit, not this page, who makes that a warmth in a quiet room rather than a rule you keep correctly.

Which is why hunger is an address

Here is the thing the scoreboard cannot survive.

Hunger is not a performance and it is not an achievement and it cannot be done well. It is an address. It is a direction to face. It is the whole of a person, body included, turned toward God, and the turning is not graded because turning is not the sort of thing that has a grade.

You are not being assessed, and there was never an assessor. That is not a soft word for a competitive woman: the word says God is not a man that He should lie, nor the son of man that He should repent (Numbers 23:19), which means He is not sitting behind your eyes running a commentary either, and it is His Spirit who makes that silence in a room feel like company rather than absence.

So what is fasting for, kept small

Here is the honest answer, and it is smaller than everything the commentary was hoping for.

Fasting is not a payment, not a performance, not a level and not a measure of anybody's seriousness. It is the body joined to a prayer that was already being prayed. It is the whole of a person turning toward God with nothing at all in her hands and nobody watching.

You will not find a plan on this page. No length, no kind, no schedule, nothing to build toward and nothing to complete, and for you in particular that absence is a mercy rather than a gap. Give a woman like you a number and she will beat it, and then she will beat that, and the whole thing will have quietly turned back around to face the room again.

Now something said here in the open and not in small print. Some people must not go without food at all, and being one of them takes nothing away from you. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with eating, if you are underweight, unwell or simply unsure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything, and let their answer be the answer. And nobody on this page will ever admire the length of anything anybody went without, because admiring it is how the scoreboard gets built in the first place. You are not one step further from God because of a doctor's instruction. Scripture says the Lord is good to all, and his tender mercies are over all his works (Psalm 145:9), and the Holy Spirit has never once come in a smaller measure to anybody on account of a body.

And if this week has more in it than a page can carry, if you are frightened for yourself, put this down and ring somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anyone near you is in danger tonight. That is not a road around God. That is help He put in the world on purpose.

The hungers that nobody would ever applaud

Here is where this becomes available to every single person reading, including the one who will never miss a meal.

There is the reach for the phone in the first quiet second. There is the wanting to be told you did well. There is the pull toward the reply that would end the argument, the second look, the noise you put on so the room is not silent.

Nobody would ever applaud you for turning one of those toward God, because nobody would ever know, which makes them the perfect material for exactly what Jesus was describing. You have a dozen chances a day to do this where no one can see. The word says a man does not live by bread alone but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God (Matthew 4:4), and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an unwitnessed Tuesday the place it actually happens.