Day 3 of 7-Day Fast
Last night, around the 48-hour mark, my emotions heightened to a point that I had trouble holding my composure in a gym full of people, mostly strangers.
It’s important to note that I am a 1 on the enneagram. I don’t like emotions. I avoid them as much as possible. I can say after a couple of years of work on myself and this last summer of more intensive work with a counselor, I am learning to let myself feel the feels, as it were. I realize that my lifetime of stuffing emotions and sweeping them under the proverbial rug of my heart has only served to hurt more than help me. Still, in a public setting, and for no apparent reason to the many surrounding me, the idea of letting tears flow was not in my wheelhouse.
I won’t go into the personal details of the root of my situation, but I will say that I had a heightened sense of the injustice I was facing, and I could not sweep or stuff in my usual way. Having gone through Practicing the Way’s small group curriculum on fasting, I knew at once that this was a result of fasting. As my flesh is ever being sacrificed, my awareness of sin and what lures the flesh is increasing. No longer could I mask the injustice in a myriad of excuses and ambivalence to the circumstances; my heart strings were being rattled at a deep level.
Confession: Since beginning this fast, many have asked me simply why? I couldn’t succinctly answer, except to say that it was something I wanted to do as a natural next step in my fasting journey, and the time of my church opening up to set aside for Israel, I felt this was the right time. I dutifully wrote a list of the breakthroughs I was believing that this fast would allow for, and I began petitioning close friends for prayer requests to apply my turbo-charged prayers toward. But after some meditation and listening to the Practicing the Way podcast again this morning, I have finally been able to identify my true reason for embarking on this fast. Simply put, my desire is for a deeper connection with God and a reawakening of my hunger for His way. So much of my life has been in steady rhythm with God. We’ve walked together over hills and deep, painful valleys. He’s always been an integral part of my life, but I’ve been longing for something more. This is my opportunity to increase in intimacy.
