I Stopped Eating For Three Days

I was such a picky eater as a child. I hardly ate a thing my parents put in front of me and it drove them mad. Eventually my dad came up with this method of the fork around the plate singing a little jingle, and when it came time for the fork to go in my mouth he’d say “open the tunnel for the choo choo train!”

Not sure how his little jingle and fork dance worked, but it did! Fast forward a couple decades and now I’ll eat just about anything you put in front of me. 

As I’ve grown in my relationship with Christ in the past 6 months, I’ve been craving new ways to grow in intimacy with Him. And for some reason, fasting is something He’s been laying on my heart recently. It’s never something I had considered for myself before. I love food too much to intentionally stop just to see if the Lord had something to tell me. Why do I have to give up food in order to hear Him speak into my life?

As the end of month one on the Race has approached, God has nudged me more and more to consider fasting. So after much prayer and spiritual discernment from my squad leader, I decided to stop eating for three days. 

The first day wasn’t so bad. I was chugging juice and water to fill my stomach as to avoid any and all hunger pangs. I spent a lot of time in the word and God gave me beautiful opportunities to disciple to some of the kids we were ministering to this month. But I still wasn’t exactly sure why I was fasting or what kind of clarity I was looking for. 

Day two. The first half of the day was again filled with juice and dancing around the topic when my teammates asked if I had eaten or wanted to join them for food. Trying to hide fasting in a community setting isn’t the easiest thing to do. But I knew it was necessary as I didn’t want their empathy to create a mindset of self pity. That night was the hardest for me. It was our last Sunday with the kids so I chose to go out to the city center with them and some teammates for food. I sat there and stared with gloom and hunger in my eyes as I watched the Gyro meat spin over and over again behind the counter. People were shoving gyros twice the size of their heads into their mouths. I love meat. Have I mentioned I love food? I began to fall into a mindset of self pity and woes. I became angry with myself. I am doing this by choice. I am doing this for a purpose. Stop giving myself pity, Erica! I bowed my head and prayed. 

“Lord give me strength that can only come from you.”

I slowly began to change my mindset. I don’t need to let hunger and food control my mood, my thoughts and my attitude. I began to be grateful to have this night to spend with the kids. I made an intentional effort to be happy and pretend like my body wasn’t feeding off itself to sustain a normal function. 

The third day I continued to spend as much alone time with God as possible. One of my absolute favorite ways to spend time with Him is by doing yoga while listening to worship music. I had been doing this in the first two days of my fasting already. But on the third day I opened up my spirit to listening prayer. 

“Lord, please tell me why I’m fasting”

I waited in my yoga pose and breathed through pain brought by uncomfortable stretches as I waited for His response.

“Self control and Love”

Those were the words God put on my heart at that moment. I meditated and reflected on those words in context to my past few days of fasting. Here are the realizations I came to by the end of the third day:

Self Control

Over the years I have not put a lot of effort into controlling the portions or type of food I’ve put into my body. Mainly it’s because I’ve been indifferent and without motivation to have that discipline of self control for food in my life. A big part of that too was the fear that I don’t have the self discipline to keep up with that kind of daily control of eating. That’s just a lot of effort for an action that happens at least three times a day, every day for the rest of my life.

But one of the fruits of the spirit that I’ve been desiring to grow in is self control. I realized during my time of fasting that if I can have better self control when it comes to food, that’s going to pour into other areas of my life. If I can conquer self control with food, then I can do that with control of my thoughts, actions and feelings.

The last part of self control I realized is that I’ve never tried self control with Christ at the center of it. And that’s why I’ve failed at it time and time again in the past. In Him I can do all things. Without Him I am nothing. Therefore, I am strong enough and can have the will power to commit to self control when done through His strength. 

Love

Loving the Lord: I learned that sometimes I put food before God to fulfil my happiness or pleasure in life. After fasting I started to look at food and water so differently. Food is to fuel my body, to nourish it and to allow me to physically do the works God has called me to do. It’s not to fill boredom or my feelings. I learned to love God better when my perspective of food shifted. 

Loving myself: I learned that my body is strong. Even without food my body was able to kick into overdrive to physically provide the strength and energy I needed to get through the long days. The food I feed myself is an expression of loving my body and thanking it for what it does for me. I learned my physical health is directly tied to my spiritual health. How I choose to feed my body reflects how I am feeding my spirit. When I am intentional and thoughtful about the food I put into my body, I can be just as intentional about how I feed my spirit. 

Loving others: I learned that often times my hunger and other things of the flesh can control my mood, which overflows into how I treat other people. The night we went for gyros I was closed off, tired and intentionally excluding myself from those around me because my hunger was dictating how I loved on people that night. When I can conquer how food affects me, no physical circumstance can influence how I chose to love others unconditionally. 

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I plan to fast again at some point in time on the Race. I’m confident the Lord will reveal new things as I enter new seasons of my faith on this journey. It was my first time ever fasting and I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. But I’m so grateful for His faithfulness and ability to renew my mind in this way. 

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