It Was Never The Empty Plate

He grew up watching his grandmother do this, and in all those years nobody once told him what it was for.

He knew the outside of it perfectly. He knew which weeks. He knew the particular way she moved through the house on those days, a bit slower, a bit quieter, the radio off. He knew that she got up earlier and that nobody was to make a fuss. He knew, without ever being told, that you did not ask her about it.

He is forty three and he has kept some of it. He does the outward part, more or less the way she did, out of love more than conviction, and every year he does it he thinks: I have no idea what I am actually doing.

That is not cynicism. He would defend that woman to anybody. It is more that he inherited a shape without the thing that made the shape, and he has been too proud to admit it and too fond of her to poke at it.

He has prayed. In the truck, in the church his mother still goes to, at the kitchen table with everybody asleep. He is not a man with a thin faith and nobody would say otherwise.

And a friend at work, meaning it kindly and knowing none of this, said: you should fast about that thing.

He said maybe. And what went through him was not hope. It was a small tiredness. Here was one more person telling him to do the outside of something nobody has ever explained the inside of.

If you inherited the shape and never got the thing that made it, come and sit at this table a while.

The prophet says it plainly

There is a sentence in Joel that people were given at exactly the moment they were about to do the outward part very impressively, and it moves the emphasis in one stroke.

And rend your heart, and not your garments, and turn unto the LORD your God: for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness.Joel 2:13

The tearing of a garment was the outward act. Everybody could see it. Everybody knew what it meant, and everybody would have known that you did it.

God does not tell them the act was worthless and He does not tell them to do it better. He tells them where the actual event is supposed to be happening, and then, in the very same breath, He tells them what He is like: gracious, merciful, slow to anger, of great kindness. That is not a rebuke with a compliment attached. That is a description of who they are turning toward, offered as the reason to turn.

You are turning toward Someone who is described in that sentence, and He was like that while nobody was explaining anything to you. I am not saying that to make an awkward inheritance easier: it is what the prophet puts in the same verse as the correction (Joel 2:13), and it is the Holy Spirit, not this page, who takes it from a line in a reading into something a man can stand on at his own kitchen table.

So here is what the inside of it is

Here is the answer nobody ever gave, and it is smaller and better than the guesses that filled the gap.

Fasting is not the empty plate. The empty plate is the outside, the way the torn garment was the outside. What is actually happening is a person turning toward God with the whole of themselves rather than only with their mouth, and the body is in it because a person is not a spirit driving a vehicle. A person is one thing.

Your grandmother, whatever she could or could not have put into words, was doing that. The slowness, the radio off, the getting up early: that was a woman turning her whole self in one direction for a while. You inherited something real, and it was never the plate. Scripture says present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service (Romans 12:1), and it is His Spirit who makes that a description of your grandmother rather than an instruction to somebody else.

And there is no plan on this page. No length, no kind, no schedule, nothing to work up to and nothing to complete, because a plan would hand you another shape without a thing inside it, and you have had quite enough of those.

Now something said out in the open here and not in fine 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. 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 anybody 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 your grandmother never mentioned either

Here is the part that makes this available today, on an ordinary Saturday, whatever your body can or cannot do.

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 house is not silent, the small satisfaction when somebody who has been difficult comes off badly.

Every one of those is a hunger with a direction on it, and every one of them can be turned, today, with no shape to inherit and nothing to get right.

You have a dozen chances at this before dinner, and not one of them needs an empty plate. 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 ordinary Saturday the place it actually happens.