The Phone At Eleven At Night

She does not decide to do it. That is the part that bothers her.

Eleven at night, everything done, the flat quiet, and her hand goes to the phone the way a hand goes to a light switch in a room you have lived in for years. There is no moment of choosing. There is a small silence, and then there is a screen.

Forty minutes later she puts it down and cannot tell you a single thing she saw.

She is not in trouble. Nobody is worried about her. She has a good life and a job she likes and people who ring her, and this is not a crisis, and that is precisely why it has never occurred to her to bring it to God. It is too small. It is not a sin worth confessing and it is not a habit worth a whole plan.

And when people at church talk about fasting, she goes quiet in the way you go quiet when a conversation is clearly about other people. She assumes it belongs to a category of Christian she is not. The ones with the notebooks. The ones who get up early on purpose.

Then a friend she loves, over lunch, said something about fasting for the thing she has been asking about for two years, and she nodded and changed the subject.

Here is what she has never said out loud: if that whole world is for people with more discipline than me, then I am watching everybody else be given something I cannot reach.

If you have ever gone quiet during that conversation, come and sit down. This one is for you specifically.

The wanting is not the problem

Let us take the assumption apart first, because everything else is stacked on it.

The reach at eleven at night is not evidence of a weak character. It is evidence of an appetite, and an appetite is not a fault. It is equipment. It is the thing in a person that goes looking, and God is the one who put it in there, and it was working perfectly well before it got pointed at a screen.

You are not disqualified from any of this, and you were never in a lower category of Christian. That is not encouragement offered to somebody feeling left out at lunch. It is written that the Lord looketh on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been in that quiet flat at eleven at night and has never once thought less of you for the reaching.

What the psalm is actually describing

There is an image at the top of Psalm 42 that everybody quotes and almost nobody looks at properly.

As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God.Psalm 42:1

That is not a disciplined animal. That is a thirsty one.

The picture is a deer that has been running and cannot think about anything except water, and the psalmist reaches for it as the honest description of how a person wants God. Not calmly. Not as a scheduled devotional habit. As a body that needs something.

So the wanting in you at eleven at night is not the opposite of prayer. It is the raw material of it. It is the same equipment, aimed somewhere easier.

You are already equipped for this, and the equipment has been working all along. I am not saying that to make somebody feel included: it is what the psalm assumes about the person praying it (Psalm 42:1), and it is His Spirit, not this page, who takes it from a familiar verse into something that changes what a quiet second in your own flat feels like.

So what is fasting, then

Here is the honest answer, and it is smaller and much more available than the picture in your head.

Fasting is not a discipline competition and it is not a payment. It is not the missing piece and it is not a category of Christian. It is the body joined to a prayer that was already being prayed. It is the whole of a person, including the part that reaches without deciding, turning toward God with nothing in her hands.

And there is no plan on this page. No length, no kind, no schedule, nothing to work up to and nothing to complete. Not because the details are being withheld, but because a plan would turn this into exactly the thing you already believe it is: an entry test with people on the other side of it.

Now something said out in the open here rather than at the bottom 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 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 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 arrived in a smaller measure to anybody on account of a body.

And if this week has more in it than a page can hold, 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 have nothing to do with food

Here is the part that makes this yours tonight, whatever your body can or cannot do.

You are hungry all day and hardly any of it is about eating, and every one of those is a door. The phone in the first quiet second. The wanting to be told you did well. The pull toward the reply that would end the argument. The noise you put on so the flat is not silent. The second helping of somebody else's bad news. Scripture 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 that something you can do at eleven at night rather than a nice idea.

Every one of those is an appetite with a direction. And every one of them is a place where the whole of you can turn, in the middle of an ordinary evening, without a plan and without a category and without anybody's permission.

You have everything you need to do this tonight, in your own front room. That is not a smaller version handed to somebody who cannot do the real thing: the word says draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you (James 4:8), and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes eleven at night the actual place that happens.