What The Hours Are For

He did it properly. That was the thing.

He put it in his calendar. He told nobody, because he had read that you were not supposed to tell anybody. He went to work, and when one o'clock came and everybody went out for their sandwiches he said he had things to catch up on, and he sat at his desk with the screen off and waited to feel something.

At twenty past one he went and sat in the little park behind the office because his desk felt daft.

And that is where the trouble started, because he had absolutely no idea what he was supposed to be doing. He tried praying. He got about ninety seconds in and ran dry, and then he sat there listening to somebody's toddler having a proper go at a pigeon, and thought: is this it? Am I doing it?

By half two he had checked his phone eleven times. By four he had a headache and a kind of low grade shame, and by the time he got home he had privately decided he was not any good at this either, and he has never mentioned it to a single person since.

Nobody had ever told him what the hours were for. They had only told him when to start.

If you have sat through an afternoon like that, come and sit down. I want to tell you what was actually going on.

You did not fail an exam nobody set

First, the shame comes off, and it comes off now rather than at the end.

There was no test that afternoon. There was no score. Nothing was being measured, and the checking of the phone did not spoil anything, and running dry after ninety seconds is what happens to nearly everybody and it is not a verdict on your spiritual life.

You are not being assessed. Not that afternoon, not this one, not by God. I am not softening this to be kind: the written word says that He knoweth our frame, and remembereth that we are dust (Psalm 103:14), which is a sentence about a Father looking at a tired man in a park and thinking nothing harsh at all, and the Holy Spirit is what makes that land rather than my saying it twice.

So if that hour felt like nothing, hear the actual news. It was not nothing. It was just not what you had been told to expect, because nobody told you anything.

What is happening in the body

Here is the plain version, and it is smaller and better than the mystery.

Prayer, most of the time, happens in the part of you that thinks. You form the words, you mean them, and the rest of you carries on being a body with a diary and a lunch break. That is real prayer and there is nothing wrong with it.

What going without does, when it does anything, is bring the rest of you into it. The stomach joins in. The part of you that gets tired and irritable and reaches for something at eleven o'clock joins in. Your body stops being the thing carrying the person who is praying and becomes part of the praying itself.

David says it that way and he does not spiritualize it at all.

O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee: my soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is.Psalm 63:1

My soul, and then my flesh. He puts them in the same line without apology. The wanting had got into his body, and rather than being embarrassed about that he wrote it down and it went into the book.

Your body praying with you is not a stunt and it is not a technique. It is the whole of you turning the same way at once. That is the shape the written word gives it, that we are to present our bodies a living sacrifice, which He calls our reasonable service (Romans 12:1), and the Spirit is the one who makes an ordinary hungry afternoon a place where a person is actually with God rather than performing.

So what were the hours for? They were for being hungry, and being with Him while you were. That is genuinely all. The emptiness was not a container you were supposed to fill with better praying. It was the prayer.

Before we go further, the part that matters more

I am going to stop the teaching here and say something plainly, because a page about hunger that does not say it is a page that can hurt somebody.

Some people must not go without food, and nothing about God is behind that door. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with food or with eating, if you are underweight, unwell, frail or elderly, or if you are simply not sure, then speak to your doctor before you go without anything, and let what they say be the answer. There is no version of this where your body's limits put you further from God. Not one. 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 His Spirit is not rationed by anybody's health.

And there is no length here, no plan, no kind of fast being described, and there never will be on this page. If you came looking for a number, I have not got one for you, and the not having one is deliberate.

If today is heavier than a page can carry, please 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. That is not stepping away from God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.

You lose nothing by needing your lunch. He hath not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted, says the psalm, neither hath he hid his face from him (Psalm 22:24), and the Spirit is what turns that from a nice line into something a diabetic reader can put weight on.