40 Day Fast

Today I am thinking about impossible situations.

The readings this week in our church’s E-100 devotionals (the Essential 100 scriptures) were rift with impossible situations:

• How to cross the Red Sea when Pharoah’s army is hot on your tail
• How to convince people that you have a good plan (the 2 spies entering Canaan)
• How to lead a nation of people when you’ve never had any experience and don’t know where you’re going
• How to cross a river when an army is not chasing after you
• How to conquer a city (Jericho) with people who have never fought before
  

At the same time, I am hearing from friends whose lives are filled with impossible situations. A mom with terminal cancer. Parents crushed with a mountain of debt. A spouse with Alzheimer’s who can’t remember where the bathroom is. A woman who dies every day when her heart stops beating for a few moments. A dad facing a 40% cut in his company’s work force.

How do we get through this? How do I pray for my friends when there aren’t ready answers?

The examples of the first set of scenarios set precedence for answers to the second. God’s answers impossible situations with impossible solutions. The impossible can only be matched by something of equal or greater impossibility: part the Red Sea, dry up the waters of the Jordan, collapse the walls of a great city with trumpets and shouting.

We’ve tried the possible, so now it’s time to try the impossible.

What am I praying for? I guess for the miraculous. I need to seek what I cannot see. I need to ask God to reveal His angle and perspective. I need to stand aside and get out of the way of forces beyond my awareness. I need to prepare myself for the extra-ordinary and the super-natural. I may need to get my feet a little wet. I may need to do something stupid, look foolish, entertain the ridiculous.

I may need to get my game on in a new way. I may need to fight, I may need to yell, I may need to stand up and do something I’ve never done before but bank that God will carry it through. I will likely have to change my game plan, alter my goals, adjust my expectations. Maybe I’ll learn I’m in the wrong game.

I think I’ll be doing something I’ve never done before, something I thought not possible. And I don’t know what that is. If I did, I guess I’d be God.

Prayer : God, I need you to be God. You are going to turn my world upside down. I am allowing that - as if I really had a choice. Help me to hold on to you while you give me new bearings. Help me to let go of the things that cause pain in the holding on. Break through, Lord, with your Holy Spirit. Empower me with the obedience that makes the impossible possible.

Answer from God: It’s in the Day #5 graphic. Get a ladder. That’s what prayer is – the means to reach up, the connection between you and Me.

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Sitting with God
When I pulled the first stroke of my regular swim, all I wanted to do was sit with God, sit with God, sit with God. I’d spent the morning doing with God, for God, with God intentions. I had had good results. But I had enough of the doing. I just wanted to sit by him. All I could imagine was being close to him. So I swam and sat, swam and sat, swam and sat, sat, sat. Not a Mary/Martha distinction of Mary choosing the better by sitting and listening to Jesus, I sat for the presence and feeling of being close. I wanted nothing but to be by God’s side. No running or trying or asking or seeking approval. It was time to sit.

Strength
Something happens when you just sit with God. It’s like osmosis. You suddenly feel stronger, like plugging yourself into a battery charger but without a current. How is that possible? I don’t know. It just happens. The strength comes from the inside, not the outside. I guess one could call it feeling whole or healed. I swam harder and the strength began to build without dissipating.

Questions for God
Feeling better, I asked God the question of the week (see Days 1-3): Do my prayers matter? Do you hear me? Are you answering me?

It came back a resounding yes. And he gave me example after example: You wanted me to show you if it’s My will that your Chinese “godson” come and visit the family to experience Christmas – and as of yesterday, he’s coming on an affordable airfare. You asked if you have a calling as an intercessor, and I’ve sent people asking you to pray for them about difficult, real, personal issues. You asked how does an intercessor pray, and I’m showing you how now.

Big ears
My friend Christy got an image of me over the summer. She wrote: I saw Pam with very big ears. Asked God what that was and I sense again that He’s going to speak in ways that are louder and louder to her – and to trust your gut Pam – it’s Him. Perhaps gifts of “hearing” – prophecy, revelatory gifts too?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know I hear from God, I thought not quite dismissively. But I take any “prophetic” word for me not so much cautiously but without expectation. I know that if I focus on that word, I will obsess, or maybe I will make it a self-fulfilling prophecy with no credit to God.

But today I heard: I have given you big ears so that you will know how to pray. If you want to pray with efficacy, you will want to hear what I am saying. That’s how your will, your prayers, meld with my will. That’s how your questions get answered, how what you hear become my answers.

Whoa. I heard that. Now I’m learning how to pray.

One last thing
I heard God reminding me: Remember, Pam, when you were young, when you were a little girl and maybe even a long time after that, you thought you were small. You aren’t tall, never were, but you also felt small. You felt like no one saw you, that people looked over you. And that hurt because no one should be looked over. You cried because you wanted to be seen. You tried because you felt you ought to be seen, but even then you were never sure that you were. I see you. I see you. I see you. And you know that now.

Yes, I do know that, Lord. When I was little, I caught glimpses. And I am no bigger, no smaller than who you made me to be. And I'm hearing this:

When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. (1 Corinthians 13:11-12)

*Hint: To get the fuller impact, read all of 1 Corinthians 13.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

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Fasts always start with good intentions and quickly wane. Here we are at Day 3 and I’m hearing the song and dance: Old habits are hard to break.

I have to be extremely intentional – which is why implementing a new spiritual discipline (the heart of fasting) best involves something that gets not just my Intention but my Attention. Today that something is abstaining from games on my iPod.

Stopping, holding back – having to forcibly use my strength and feel my will turn away from that one little game – really required muscle. Don’t reach for it, don’t, don’t, don’t! Arrgghh, and why am I doing this? Oh yeah, so I will focus on my relationship with God. Bingo! Pain and loss work well in our lives because when we feel it, we have to figure out what to do with it.

The other part of my fast, praying for my friend, my financial advisor, I really had to think about. What would be a good prayer? What is going on his day and in his office that needs more than a Band-aid. Where and how might the Holy Spirit make a felt difference? How does God want me to look at my friend as I am praying? Beyond his occupation, I think, and beyond results to where God is moving him.

Today, my small group talked about Joshua 1 where the Lord gives Joshua command over the Israelites to take them into the Promised Land. God tells Joshua three times, “Be strong and courageous.” That’s a word for us. Every move forward is a step into new territory that takes strength and courage. And God says, “I am with you.”

What I am learning:

• Interceding in prayer requires seeking God’s eyes, perspective, and truth.
• We are never alone.

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Every fall, our church family engages in a 40-day fast that ends on Thanksgiving Day. The object is to seek greater intimacy with God by giving up a practice that can distract us from his presence in our lives. I've decided, therefore, to use this blog to observe, record, and reflect on what happens during these 40 days.

Day 1
Okay, so I thought about the fast. Actually, I had been thinking about it for at least a week and what I would do for it. These fasts always have a very positive impact on me. Sometimes I abstain from something. And sometimes I engage in something.

One time I went vegetarian and did not tell my family - on purpose. That was part of my deal. They never did find out. Something I learned on that round was how much attention my husband and kids really pay attention to me - ha! ha!

Several times, I have abstained from buying anything I really don't need. Makes me think twice, thrice about my needs vs. my wants and also makes me appreciate how much God already has supplied me.

Once I completely abstained from visual media: no TV, no magazines or newspapers. That meant that when I went to the doctor's office or hair cutters, all those piles of People Magazines were off limits. What a mind purger that was!

On a more recent fast, I tried, I really tried, to go to sleep every night before midnight. Note I said I tried. No further comment.

End of Day 1: Just don't do anything stupid that I might consider for a fast.

Day 2
That's today.
Realized that my best fasts are those that God calls me to. In other words, when it’s His idea and not just mine. Maybe that's why the "sleep before midnight" thing didn't work. Getting enough sleep's just plain good for my health. Maybe I'll instigate that anyway, not for the fast but just as a health discipline for my own good.

God did tell me something today that I feel called to undertake as part of my fast:
Pray daily for my financial advisor and his office staff.

This is not just because of the current market turmoil, although my advisor said when I told him that he would like the prayers to help him think clearly through the financial smog. I just have never consistently prayed for him. And I should. He and his staff have a ministry to me and the people connected to me. It’s not about the money but about God’s future for me and my family and others we impact:

• God’s provision of college educations to equip my children to use their gifts and serve others with greater capacity
• resources that we can use to support churches and ministries
• investing God’s treasures as in the Parable of the Talents in Matthew 25

And how do I know it’s his idea and not mine? Simply, because I would not have thought of it on my own. I’m just not that good.

End of Day 2:
I am thinking about whether intercession is a spiritual gift. Are there really gifted intercessors? Or:

1. Are the people who others consider “powerful prayers” seen as more effective because they are further along the road in spiritual growth and, therefore, have their wills more frequently and more closely aligned with God’s will?
2. Do they make others feel better by giving the sheer assurance that one is being prayed – and that in turn or comforts and gives peace?
3. Knowing that we are not alone and that someone else knows our concerns allow us to be more willing to accept God’s answers about a situation, even though we may not have liked it before?
4. Are we all called to pray for one another (yes, duh) - but when we actually engage in prayer with true love and concern, does that change every thing?

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