Food takes time. We spend time growing food, harvesting food, selling food, shopping for food, preparing food, and consuming food. We store leftover food, clean up after we’ve eaten food, and take medication when we’ve had too much food. We read books, peruse magazines, and eagerly watch television cooking shows to learn new ways of preparing food. Children (and sometimes church youth groups) play with food, while millions in this world do not have enough food. Fasting is a vital spiritual discipline that is vastly overlooked and misunderstood. As Christ’s disciples, we have much to learn and to teach to restore the need for fasting. When I was newly married, my wife decided that she would fast for Lent. It was not a diet or a fad, but an opportunity that she described as a spiritual and physical cleansing. For several weeks into the forty days of Lent, she consumed only liquids and vitamins. At her doctor’s insistence, she added soup and then some fish. Friends did not understand. They asked her where she got the diet. They wanted to know how much weight she had lost. They asked if she was working out with her fast and if she was monitoring her measurements.
Some church members asked if she had come from a Roman Catholic family. Others wondered if she was Lutheran. I suspected that these folks listened to Public Radio’s “Prairie Home Companion” for their understanding of what it meant to be Lutheran. Still others, unable to comprehend or relate to her spiritual perspective, merely considered her strange or perhaps a bit fanatical about her religion.
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