The Key You Were Told You Cannot Use

She was standing by the biscuits at the end of the meeting, which is a detail she would rather not have remembered, and a woman she genuinely likes said it warmly and with both hands on her arm.

For something like this, love, you want to be fasting.

And she said yes, absolutely, and made a face that could have meant anything, and moved the conversation somewhere else within about nine seconds, because she has had thirty years of practice at moving conversations.

She is diabetic. She has been since she was eleven. Going without food is not a spiritual decision she has been avoiding out of softness. It is a thing her consultant has been extremely clear about, in the plain voice consultants use when they want you to actually hear them.

So she drove home doing the sum she has done a hundred times. Everybody else has a key. She has a locked door and a note from the doctor.

And underneath that, quieter and much older: maybe there are rooms in God that other people get into.

If you have ever done that sum in a car, this one is for you, and I am not going to hand you a smaller version of anybody else's key.

There is no locked room

Let us take the sum apart, because it is wrong in the first line and everything after it inherits the error.

The sum assumes that going without food is a door, and that on the far side of the door there is something of God you can only get at that way. Take that assumption out and the whole calculation collapses, and it should, because it is not in the book anywhere.

You are not standing outside anything. There is no part of God, no depth of Him, no nearness and no answer, that is kept behind a door your body is not allowed through. That is not me being gentle with you. It is what is written, that in Christ dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily, and ye are complete in him (Colossians 2:9 and 10), and complete is not a word with a corridor left off the end of it, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that settle in a woman driving home from a church hall.

The woman by the biscuits was not being unkind. She was passing on a thing she had been given, warmly, the way people do. She simply had no idea she was handing somebody a key to a door they are not allowed to stand near.

What God actually said about what is already in your hands

There is a sentence Paul writes about giving, and it is the sentence I would put on the inside of your windscreen.

For if there be first a willing mind, it is accepted according to that a man hath, and not according to that he hath not.2 Corinthians 8:12

According to what a person has. Not according to what they have not.

That is the whole principle and it is not a concession. It is not God making allowances for the unfortunate. It is God stating, flatly, how He has always received people: He looks at what is actually in your hands, and He does not run a second column for the things that were never in them.

You are received exactly as you come, and your body is not a deduction. The written word says the Lord seeth not as man seeth, for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), and the Spirit is what turns that from a line you know into something that holds while you are counting insulin.

So when somebody says fasting is the key, hear it for what it is: a person describing their own experience in the biggest words they have. It is not a survey of how God works. And the practice itself, when it is anything at all, is only ever a body joining a prayer that was already being prayed. Yours is already praying. It has been praying through thirty years of this.

And I am not offering you a smaller version

I want to be careful here, because this is where pages like this usually go wrong.

I am not going to suggest you do a little one. I am not going to propose skipping something small, or going without in a reduced way that your body might tolerate, or any arrangement that lets you feel you have got a foot in the room after all. That would be the same wrong sum with better manners, and it would still leave you standing outside a door that does not exist.

You are not owed a substitute, because you have not been shorted. He hath not dealt with us after our sins, nor rewarded us according to our iniquities (Psalm 103:10), and if He does not run that column, He is certainly not running one for a pancreas, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land where the old sum used to sit.

If you are ill, stay with your doctor. Nothing on this site suggests going without food as a way of getting better, of helping a condition, or of shifting a diagnosis. And if today has more weight in it than a page can carry, ring somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight.