You Cannot Pay Him In Your Own Suffering

He would not call it a bargain. He would tell you he has never made one, and he would not be lying, and it would not be the truth either.

Here is what it looks like from outside. He takes the shift nobody else wants. He gives away the good chair. He has not had a proper holiday in years, and when his sister rings and says he needs one he says he is fine and he means it, mostly. He carries other people's weight and he does not talk about his own, and he is the kind of man everybody in a family describes as solid.

And here is what it looks like from inside, which he has never described to anybody.

There is a sum going on in him. Not with numbers. It runs something like this: if I take enough on myself, if I go without enough, if I hurt quietly enough and long enough about the right things, then surely at some point God has to relent about the one thing I keep asking Him for.

He worked it out about eighteen months ago, driving home over the pass, and he has been uneasy about it ever since, because once you have seen a thing like that in yourself you cannot unsee it.

He has prayed. Do not mistake this for a man who does not pray. He prays in the truck and he prays with his children and he prayed at his grandmother's grave in the language she used, badly, because he never learned it properly and she would have laughed at him.

And a friend at church said, kindly, meaning it entirely as help: brother, have you fasted about it?

He said he would think on it. He has thought about very little else. And what moved in him was not hope. It was the sum recognizing a new column. Here was something else he could take off himself.

If you have been paying God in your own hard years, come and sit up here a while. I am going to name the wound before I say anything else, because that is the only honest order.

The wound underneath the arrangement

Somebody taught you, early, to measure your worth by what you could carry.

Not with a sentence. Nobody sat you down. It came through in who got thanked and who got asked, in whose tiredness counted and whose was simply expected, and by the time childhood was over it had gone all the way in and become the shape of your shoulders.

So when you came to God, you brought the only thing you had ever been paid in: what you could take. It was not manipulation. It was the only language anybody had taught you for being valuable to somebody.

You are worth something that has nothing to do with what you carry, and you were before you carried anything. That is not a soft word said to a solid man on a porch. 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 through every unclaimed holiday and every shift you took, and has never once valued you by the weight of it.

What He said He actually required

There is a passage in Micah where somebody offers God escalating amounts of suffering, and God's answer is the flattest, kindest refusal in the prophets.

Wherewith shall I come before the LORD, and bow myself before the high God? shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old? Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams? shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?Micah 6:6

The escalation is the point. The man is bidding himself upward, and by the last line he has arrived at the most terrible offer a human being can make.

And God does not accept it, and He does not counter it, and He does not tell him to bid higher.

He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?Micah 6:8

Read the three. Do justly. Love mercy. Walk humbly with your God. Not one of them is a quantity. Not one of them can be increased by hurting more.

You are already required to do nothing that can be suffered into existence. I am not saying that to make a hard life easier to look at: it is exactly what God answers a man who was bidding upward (Micah 6:8), and it is His Spirit, not this page, who takes it from something you would agree with into something that changes what you do with a Saturday.

Then what is fasting, if it is not payment in kind

Here is the honest answer, and it is much smaller than what the sum in you was hoping.

Fasting is not payment and it is not suffering offered as currency. It is not the missing piece and it is not one more thing you can take off yourself to make the total look better. It is the body brought into a prayer that was already going up. It is the whole of a person, including the part that gets hungry and tired and drives home over a pass, turning toward God with nothing in his hands.

And here is the specific danger for a man like you, so let it be said plainly. Nothing on this site will ever ask you to hurt more. Going without food is not a way of paying, it is not a discipline to be admired, and there is nothing holy in emptiness, and anybody who tells you that the longer or the harder the better has understood none of this. You are not asked for any of it, and none of it was ever the currency. Scripture says it is not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us (Titus 3:5), and it is His Spirit who makes that a straightening of the shoulders rather than a doctrine you would nod along to.

Now something said in the open, and for you it matters more than most. 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 unsure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything, and let their answer be the answer. And a man who has been quietly taking things off himself for years needs feeding, not one more thing removed. You are not one step further from God because of what a doctor said. 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.