Wednesday Freewrite about Fasting

Photo Credit: Nitish Meena from https://quotefancy.com/ 

I really love to write. Just sayin'. I don't know if I will ever get around to publishing the many things that I have written and used in my ministry, but I enjoy it so much. 

This is why I "freewrite" on a regular basis. And I do it here for anyone to see. I don't really think of anyone seeing it, but I tend to be a "what you see is what you get" kind of person. My life is really more of an open book. I have nothing to hide. And why would I want to? 

(This is how I know I am not a Type 3 - many 3s have a "persona" they present to the world, and it is something I have never quite gotten. That is why I always say that even though I appear on the outside to have more of an Enneagram 3 wing, I identify internally with the Type 1 wing more.)

There has been a big push to have 40 Days of Prayer and Fasting for a breakthrough in the group that I am a part of. I think that it is premature, but I missed the meeting because I messed up on my emails for two weeks and had it on "attachments" being at the top versus "latest date." So I totally missed the whole meeting where many got excited about having 40 days of fasting between March and Easter. I love to fast, no joke. I have been doing it since my days in the Navigators because that was what everyone did. It is weird to have many of these people talk about having never really done it until more recently. I also read the Celebration of Discipline in 1978, and that spiritual discipline was reinforced. So, my team is in the middle of developing podcasts on different spiritual disciplines, and they are more geared toward abiding. So I see a big difference between abiding for eliminating distraction that causes me to seek God's face (every time I have a hunger pain, I turn that hunger into a hunger for God) versus fasting for breakthrough (seeing something "happen") So if this fast happens, it will be 9 months into a 12-month journey through the abiding disciplines. It will seem like a hiatus in the abiding practices train that we are on. 

So why not wait? I agree that God's Chosen Fast is an excellent book to read. That was one of my guiding books when I got even more intentional about fasting. And much of it was for personal reasons, but some of it was for breakthrough (I fasted until Kenneth came out of his coma in the 90s, and he did). 

So how do I communicate that to the masses and be bold? I want to be a revolutionary, but I think the building block needs to be abiding first. Then we get into the power part. It would just break up what we are already doing. 

At this point, the podcasts will be done in June or July of 2022. Why not have that happen after the abiding part is all done? Then we can get to the power part. Why rush to the POWER? I am not talking about naval-gazing, but I believe gazing at God causes us to move out in power. We cannot manufacture the power. I skimmed the chapter on fasting in Celebration of Discipline, and that was very good.