Are you hungry enough to make yourself a sandwich?

So, we’re starting the year thinking about fasting. It’s not exactly a big high to begin the year with, is it? Talk about a downer after all the fun of Christmas and New Year.

My grumpiness probably tells you a lot about my current relationship with fasting. But let’s go further back and I’ll give you the warts and all history.

My Christian family didn’t really ‘do’ fasting when I was growing up. That was a little too extreme. So I wasn’t really introduced to the idea until I encountered the crazy charismatics as a teenager. I seem to remember trying the odd bit of fasting as a result, but my mum was very unamused and always made me eat dinner. And to be honest, I didn’t really mind.  I really love food.

But then at university I got inspired. Somehow I ended up reading a book by a radical guy called Lou Engle, who is part of the leadership of a big church in LA and led a national prayer movement in the US called The Call, which was big around the year 2000. He’s a fairly extreme guy and encouraged people to fast for up to forty days – he did so regularly himself. This was crazy new territory for me, but I was excited. (I tried a couple of week long fasts, fuelled by sugary coffee and smoothies).

Back when I started uni, the 24-7 prayer movement was just kicking off, and my church was part of it all. We regularly had 24-7 prayer weeks. We prayed and warfared, we shouted and cried and worshipped. We were desperate to see God move. Heck, I even went to LA to find Lou Engle himself. I felt full of faith, full of passion, and I longed for God to do more than I had experienced before. Some good stuff happened, but nothing like what we were dreaming of and praying for.

Then London…and things were less extreme. I guess the pitch I’d been living at wasn’t sustainable. I developed a rhythm of fasting once a week as a way of saying ‘I think there is more than this and I still want it’.  But I don’t think I hear any teaching about fasting for many years. Until we came to The Well, and somehow it was a regular part of the conversation again.

Then pregnancy and breastfeeding…and it all stopped. I’ve been meaning to get going again, but I haven’t.  And then a whole month of teaching about fasting was announced…sigh.

But then I read something Bill Johnson said in a recent interview that really challenged me. He was talking about the combination of hunger and humility as the big thing that precedes any great move of God:

Sometimes I’m in the family room with my wife watching TV and she asks if I want something to eat and I say, ‘Yes, I’m starving.’ I wasn’t starving enough to go and get some food myself, but if it’s convenient and she’s prepared to bring me some food, I’ll eat it. There are two sorts of hunger: the ‘I’ll go out and hunt for it because I’m so hungry’, and there’s convenient hunger: ‘I’ll eat if you feed me’. The kind of breakthrough we need in the nations will only be accomplished by the former.

That hit me hard.  And it’s the thing I’m revolving in my mind as we wrestle with the topic of fasting this month.  How hungry am I?  How hungry are you?