One Of Them Prays And One Of Them Performs

She has been at this a long time and she still cannot tell, from the inside, which one she is doing.

That is the question she has never put to anybody, and she has had thirty years of chances. She has led. She has prayed for people in the aisle at eleven at night. She has gone without for things that mattered to her more than she could say, and she has meant every bit of it, and somewhere in the middle of meaning it there is always a second voice.

The second voice is the one that notices. It notices how it sounded. It notices whether she is being seen doing this well, and whether she is being serious in the way the serious people are serious, and it does not go away when she tells it to.

So she has arrived at a suspicion about herself that she has never spoken out loud: that the whole of her devotion might be a performance she has been giving for so long that she can no longer find the edge of it.

She prays. Loudly, gladly, in public, and quietly at home in a chair that has a dent in it now. She is not a woman with a small faith and nobody who knows her would say otherwise.

And a sister she loves said, over a pot on the stove: have you fasted about that thing?

She said she would. She has thought about it every day. And what came up in her was not hope. It was the second voice, sitting up. Here was another chance to be seen doing something well, even if the only one watching was her.

If you cannot find the edge of your own sincerity, come here and stand by the stove with me. I am not going to ask you to prove anything.

The second voice is not the verdict

Let us settle that first, because it has been carried around like evidence for years.

The presence of that voice does not prove the devotion is fake. It proves you are a self aware person, which is not a spiritual condition, it is a personality. Some people cannot see themselves at all and some people cannot stop, and the second sort spend their whole lives interrogating a sincerity the first sort never even check.

You are not a fraud, and you were never once assessed on whether the second voice was quiet. That is not a kindness offered to a woman by a stove. It is written that the Lord looketh on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been reading yours for thirty years and can tell the difference perfectly well even on the mornings when you cannot.

Being unable to audit yourself is not a disqualification. It is one of the ordinary limits of being a person, and God has never once been dependent on your self assessment to know you.

The test God actually gave

There is a chapter in Isaiah where God tells people who were fasting a great deal that He was not interested, and He does not test them on their motives. He tests them on their street.

Is not this the fast that I have chosen? to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke?Isaiah 58:6

Look where He points. Not inward.

He does not tell them to examine their sincerity, and He does not tell them to feel it more. He tells them to look at who is bound near them, and He describes the fast He chooses in terms of somebody else's Tuesday getting easier.

You already have a way through that does not require you to solve yourself. I am not saying that to let anybody off: it is exactly where God directs a people who were very religious and going nowhere (Isaiah 58:6), and it is His Spirit, not this page, who turns that from a famous chapter into an actual door out of a hall of mirrors.

So what is fasting, kept small and kept honest

Here is the plain answer, and it is smaller and warmer than the interrogation.

Fasting is not a performance and it is not a proof of sincerity. It is not a payment, not leverage, and not the missing piece. It is the body joined to a prayer that was already being prayed. It is the whole of a person turning toward God, and turning is not the sort of thing that has a grade, which is precisely why the second voice cannot get a foothold on it.

There is no plan on this page. No length, no kind, no schedule, nothing to work toward and nothing to complete, and nobody here is going to admire anybody for going without anything, because admiration is exactly what feeds a voice like the one you have got.

Now something said out loud here rather than 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 not sure, 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 what a doctor told you. 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 nobody will ever see

Here is where the mirrors stop being a problem, and it arrives before a single thing about yourself has been solved.

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 relief when somebody else has a worse week than yours.

Nobody will ever see you turn one of those. There is no version of it that can be performed, because there is no audience and no visible act, and that makes it the one piece of ground in your whole life where the second voice has nothing to comment on.

You have a dozen chances a day at something that cannot be performed. 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 second the place it actually happens.