The Way Hands Get Joined To A Job

He said the same eleven words about it every morning for four years, and one morning he heard himself.

It was in the truck, first thing, engine running, the way he has prayed about most things his whole life. He said the eleven words. And then he sat there for a second with his hand on the gearstick and thought: I say that, and then I get on with my day exactly as though I had not.

He is not being hard on himself. He would want that clear. The praying was real and it still is. He is not one of those men who says a thing he does not mean.

It is more that he noticed a split. His mouth has been in the matter for four years and the rest of him has been somewhere else, and for a man who has spent his whole life joining hands to jobs, that struck him as an odd way to go on.

He knows what it looks like when a man means a thing. It looks like a fellow who says he will help you get hay in before the rain, and then his truck is in your yard at five in the morning with his boots already on. The saying and the doing are the same event. That is what meaning something looks like where he comes from.

And a man at church said, kindly enough: you ever thought about fasting over it?

He said he had not. He has thought about it since. And what he mostly felt was the usual suspicion of anything that sounds like a program, because he has watched people take up programs and he has watched them put them down.

If your mouth has been in something for years and the rest of you has not, come and sit on a bale here a while.

The plainest sentence in Paul

Let us go to the verse, because it says the whole thing in fewer words than I would use.

I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.Romans 12:1

Look at the last two words, because that is the phrase a working man ought to hear.

Reasonable service. Not extraordinary service. Not the advanced course. He is saying that a person bringing the whole of themselves, body included, into what they have already said with their mouth is the sensible thing, the fitting thing, the thing that makes plain sense once you see it.

And look at what it is built on. By the mercies of God. That is the ground he stands the request on: not on an obligation and not on a debt of any kind, but on what has already been given.

You are already standing in the mercy that whole sentence is built on, and it was there before the asking. I am not saying that to soften anything for a man on a hay bale: it is the ground Paul names before he says one word about bodies (Romans 12:1), and it is the Holy Spirit, not this page, who takes it from a verse a man could recite into something that changes what praying in a truck is like.

Which is all fasting is

Here is the plain answer, and it is smaller than a program.

Fasting is the hands joined to the job the mouth already named. It is not a payment. It is not leverage, and it is not the missing piece, and it is not information carried up to a God who had not heard your eleven words. It is the rest of a man agreeing with what his mouth has been saying for four years.

That is all. And you will notice it has nothing in it to take up and put down, which is why nobody on this page is going to hand you one.

There is no plan here. No length, no kind, no schedule, nothing to work up to and nothing to finish. Every one of those would turn this back into the sort of program you have rightly been suspicious of your whole life.

Now here is a thing I will say out loud rather than in fine print. Some folks must not go without food at all, and being one of them takes nothing off you. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard road with eating, if you are underweight, unwell, or you simply do not know, talk 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 man because of his body.

And if this week has more in it than a page can hold, if you are frightened for yourself, put this down and call a real person: 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.

The hungers that have nothing to do with a plate

And here is the part that puts this in the hands of every man and woman reading, whatever they are able to do.

There is a reach for the phone in the first quiet second. There is the wanting to be told you did the job well. There is the pull toward the argument you could win, the second look, the radio you put on so the cab is not quiet, the small satisfaction when a fellow who talked big comes off badly.

Every one of those is an appetite pointing somewhere, and every one of them can get joined to the job in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday, with no program and no equipment and nobody knowing.

You have got everything you need for this in the truck with you right now. 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 that an actual Tuesday rather than a fine sentence.