You Want Him And You Do Not Know How

She got up early on purpose, which for her is a whole event, and then sat at the table for forty minutes not really doing anything.

She had the Bible out. She had made the tea. She had put her phone in the other room, which is the sort of thing people recommend, and she sat there in a cold kitchen at ten past six wanting something she could not have described if you had asked her for a definition.

And then she got up and put a wash on, because the sitting had started to feel like failing.

This is not a woman with no faith. She would tell you she believes it, most days, in the plain unspectacular way that people who have thought about things believe them. What she does not have is a method. She has never had one. She came into this late and sideways and nobody ever sat her down and told her what people actually do, and she has been too proud, or too something, to ask a question with an obvious answer.

So when the conversation at her church turns to fasting or to disciplines or to somebody's morning routine, she has the particular feeling of a person who arrived after the instructions were handed out.

And a woman she likes said, kindly, over the washing up: have you tried fasting about it?

She said she might. She has thought about it since. And what she felt was not hope. It was the old one. Here is one more thing everybody else apparently knows how to do.

If you have sat at a table wanting something you could not name, come and sit here a while.

The wanting is not the waiting room

Let us take the assumption apart, because everything else in that kitchen stands on top of it.

The assumption goes like this: the longing is what happens before the real thing starts. There is a method somewhere, and the method is the thing, and until a person locates it they are standing in the corridor outside the actual room.

That is precisely backwards, and Scripture is quite blunt about it.

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

Read what he is doing. He is not describing a technique he has mastered. He is describing a thirst, in a place with no water in it, and this is the psalm people have gone back to for three thousand years as the model of seeking God.

The man had no method either. He had a dry land and a body that wanted something, and that is what got written down and kept.

You are already doing the thing, and the wanting at that table was the thing. I am not saying that to comfort somebody who put the wash on: it is what the psalm consists of from beginning to end (Psalm 63:1), and it is the Holy Spirit, not this page, who turns it from a lovely verse into permission to stop hunting for a manual.

So what is fasting, if it is not the manual

Here is the honest answer, and it is smaller and much less exclusive than the assumption it replaces.

Fasting is not a technique and it is not a level and it is not the instructions you missed. It is not a payment and it is not the missing piece. It is the body joined to a prayer that was already being prayed. It is the whole of a person, including the part that gets cold and tired and gives up at ten past six, turning toward God with empty hands.

And there is no plan on this page. No length, no kind, no schedule, nothing to work up to and nothing to complete. That is deliberate, and for you it is the whole point: a plan would confirm the thing you already suspect, which is that this is a subject with an entrance exam.

Now something said out in the open rather than in small print at the bottom. 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. You are not one step further from God because of what a doctor has 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 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 detour around God. That is help He put in the world on purpose.

The hungers you already have

Here is what makes this available before a single thing has been learned.

You are hungry all day, most of it has nothing to do with food, and every one of those is a door standing open. The reach for the phone in the first quiet second. The wanting to be told you did well. The pull toward the argument you could win, the noise you put on so the house is not silent, the second look, the small relief of somebody else having a worse week. 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 a live option on an ordinary morning rather than a fine sentence.

Every one of those is a longing with a direction on it, and every one of them can be turned, in the middle of an ordinary morning, with no instructions and no equipment and no morning routine.

You have everything you need for this already, and you have had it the whole time. That is not a consolation prize handed to a latecomer: the word says draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you (James 4:8), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a cold kitchen at ten past six the actual place that happens.