I have a love-hate relationship with fasting. I went through a period several years ago during which I fasted one day a week for about four years. It was a fascinating experience—really, honestly fascinating. Most people don’t believe me when I say that fasting has very little to do with food. It’s true!  Fasting taught me how to say no to myself. It taught me that just because I find a wonderful book, I don’t have to buy it; that just because a Hurricane from Handel’s with peanut butter cups and Heath bars sounds great right now, I’ll survive just fine without it.  Something much more important may be calling from just beyond the craving.

I discovered there are a lot of things I don’t actually need, but that I really, really want all the same.  There is a whole lot all around us that we know full well we don’t need—we just don’t want to do without them.  We see no immediate reason to say no, so we give in. We hunger, and the first thing that comes our way that seems to satisfy the appetite gets indulged in an effort to quash the hunger.

But it turns out there is something I really, really want much deeper inside me—a living, breathing, conversational relationship with Jesus. Fasting taught me that there are all sorts of appetites competing within me for Jesus’ easy, friendly companionship.

So I was feeling restless this afternoon….

About six months ago, I felt a nudging to fast again. I resisted, though, because, well, fasting is rather unpleasant, and besides, if I tried fasting through a school day I honestly thought I’d pass out from all the effort and energy I expend through the day, and I wouldn’t be focused for my students—you get the picture.

Well, a few months later the nudging had still not gone away, so it looked like I was going to have to do something. I decided to fast through lunch twice a week. It not only went well, it went better than expected. I met God there. Sure, I got a little hungry, but the little grumbling was a good reminder of my need for God, that there’s a subterranean hunger running much deeper than the trickle of our little appetites.  And what’s more, it didn’t prove to be a distraction from my students or my teaching.

So school gets out a few weeks ago, and I decide to let the fasting go. Only the nudging kept on. But I answered the nudge and I’ve pretty much kept up with the same plan, with I think one exception. And I had decided earlier this morning to let it go today.

A bit later, I’m sitting out on the patio reading about lectio divina, a practice I heartily enjoy and strongly recommend (check out Ruth Haley Barton’s Sacred Rhythms or look it up on Bible Gateway). I was going to finish the chapter, then get up, change the laundry and get some lunch. Then I thought that, since I missed my regular devotions this morning for the sake of a (very) early elders meeting, I would look up today’s gospel passage (Matthew 16:24-28) and do a little lectio. Your first time through the reading (four times all together), you’re just looking for a word or a phrase to cry out for your attention, when … Bam!  There it is: “let them deny themselves.”

I’m willing to bet right now that you’re hearing God more clearly than I did right then! Fasting? Deny yourself? Get it, Ralph? Believe it or not, though, I went through all four repetitions of the Bible passage before it hit me that God was prompting me to fast after all.

I dug deeper into the reflections. I asked myself, “What are you feeling? What are you afraid of?”

“Well, I don’t have enough now, enough time, enough money, enough energy, enough talent.  I’m afraid!  What if I go ahead and deny myself and You take away even my ‘not enough’?”  I closed the book and looked off into the woods, then looked down and saw a blurb on the back cover:  “Make the decision to leave all outcomes to God.”

As I sat today reading Frank Laubach’s Letters by a Modern Mystic and mulling over my work as a teacher, I read about him praying for the Moro people he was serving.  As he prayed he heard God say, “The most beautiful thing in the universe for you is [the village of] Lanao stretching around this lake at your feet, for it contains the beauty of immense need. You must awaken the hunger there, for until they hunger they cannot be fed.”  Is it possible that the best thing I can do for my students is not to craft snazzier lesson plans, but to search out the means of awakening their hunger for truth, beauty, and goodness?

So it turns out the hunger I’ve been speaking of is not really about food at all!  We are hungry for all sorts of things, and most of the time we have no idea what.  But we are determined to satisfy it, so we clamor after and clutch at anything and everything that presents itself to our appetite.

Fasting, though, takes a small thing like food and uses it to teach us the best way to satisfy that hunger: listen to it.  Let it rumble, and be reminded that indeed, “one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” What do I really, truly hunger for?  Why settle for ice cream or cookies, alcohol or sex, shopping or video games when I can revel in the joyful, peace-filled, radiant immediacy of Jesus Himself, God incarnate?

Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life?”