Nobody Ever Explained The Small Part

She has been in a church pew since before she could see over the back of it, and nobody has ever sat her down and told her plainly what a person is supposed to do.

She knows a great deal. She knows more Scripture by heart than most of the people who have preached at her. She has made more casseroles for grieving families than she could count, and she has held hands in a hospital corridor at four in the morning, and if you asked her about the Lord she would not hesitate for a second.

But there is a small part she never got.

She could not name it exactly. It is the how. When people talk about fasting, or about waiting on the Lord, or about any of the things that sound like practices, she has the distinct feeling that everybody else got a lesson she was out of the room for. Nobody ever said: here is what you actually do with your hands and your morning. It was all assumed.

She is seventy three. And here is the honest part: she is not going to ask now. There is a pride in it, and there is something sorer than pride, which is the idea of somebody her granddaughter's age discovering that she does not know a thing she has apparently been doing for sixty years.

She prays plenty. In the garden, at the sink, with the radio on low, and out loud in the car where nobody hears her, which she suspects is the truest of the lot.

And a neighbor said over the fence: have you ever fasted about that?

And she said she would think on it. And what she felt was not hope. It was that same small dropping in the chest, the one that comes with a subject where everybody else seems to have the instructions.

If there is a small part nobody ever explained to you either, come and sit on the porch here a while, and I will tell you the whole of it, and it will not take long.

The disciples had to ask too

Here is the first thing, and I want you to see who is standing in the sentence.

And it came to pass, that, as he was praying in a certain place, when he ceased, one of his disciples said unto him, Lord, teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples.Luke 11:1

Those were men who had left everything to follow Him. They had been walking with Him for a good while by then. They had seen things.

And one of them says, out loud, in front of the others: teach us to pray. That is a grown man admitting he does not know the small part, and Luke wrote it down and kept it in, and it has been read out in churches ever since without anybody thinking less of him.

You are in decent company in not knowing, and there was never a lesson everybody else attended. That is not a kindness offered to an old woman on a porch. It is what the passage plainly shows about the people closest to Jesus (Luke 11:1), and it is the Holy Spirit who made sure that question stayed in the book for everybody who came after and needed to see it.

So here is the small part, plainly

I am going to say it in ordinary words and then I am going to stop, because it is small, and dressing it up is how it got lost in the first place.

Fasting is your body joining in with a prayer you were already praying. That is it. It is not a payment and it is not a lever and it is not a technique. It is the whole of a person turned toward God at once, instead of only the mouth being turned while the rest of you carries on.

There is no number attached to that. No length, no kind, no schedule, nothing to get right, nothing to work up to and nothing to finish. You are not missing a set of instructions, because there is not a set to miss. The word 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 plain thing a woman can do at a sink rather than a subject other people know about.

Now here is a thing I will say out loud rather than in small print at the bottom. Some folks must not go without food at all, and being one of them takes nothing away from you. If you live with diabetes, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard road with eating, if you are frail or underweight or unwell, if you are older and not sure, or if you simply do not know, speak to your doctor before you go without anything, and let what they say be the answer. You are not one step further from God on account of a doctor's advice. The word 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 a woman because of what her body can do.

And if today has more in it than a page can hold, if you are frightened for yourself, put this down and call 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 going around God. That is help He put in this world on purpose.

And here is the part that is yours today

Now I will tell you the piece that nobody ever mentions, and it is the piece that puts this in your hands this evening whatever your body can do.

The hunger does not have to be food. It never had to be.

There is the reach for the telephone in the first quiet minute. There is the wanting to be told you did it right. There is the pull toward saying the thing that would settle an argument you have already won in your head, the radio you put on so the house is not silent, the small satisfaction when somebody who was short with you at church has a hard week.

Every one of those is a wanting with a direction on it. You have got a dozen of them a day, and every single one is a door. 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 evening at a kitchen sink the place it actually happens.