Fasting to Be HungryExemplo

Fasting for hunger

When I started fasting, I thought it was a matter of postponing a meal for 2 hours and then throwing myself on everything I could find in the fridge. Fasting seemed like torture to me and I didn't understand what it was for. I later discovered a lot of powerful truths about fasting, which led me to do regular fasts and then extended fasts of 3, 7, 21, or 40 days.

The first thing we experience when we fast is hunger! If you are hungry, it is normal, it is not proof of lack of spiritual maturity or personal incompatibility with this spiritual practice, as I thought at the beginning.

One of the most important prayers in my life is: "Lord, make me hungry and thirsty for you." Indeed, I have seen that God has prepared a table, that it is full of good things for us, but that God invites the hungry and thirsty to come and help themselves. So it is possible to miss things prepared by the Lord for us because of our lack of hunger for spiritual things.

Hunger can prevent us from sleeping, it can preoccupy our thoughts and become a priority over other activities. It can overturn our shyness and make us ask for food, it can crush our pride and make us beg or eat what we don't like. When we are hungry, we are willing to pay a higher price for food.

In the same way, hunger and thirst for the things of God drive us to seek him. They give us the audacity to seek God. It is this attitude that Jesus describes when he says that it is the violent ones who seize the kingdom of God. When we are hungry for God, no circumstance can prevent us from entering into his presence, from contemplating him, from satiating ourselves with his blessings.

So I fast first of all to be hungry, and when I feel this hunger, I say to my body, "You shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. Lord, I am hungry for you, speak to me. I fast to learn to desire God's word more than anything else.”

Specifically, it is the first 3 days that we feel the most hungry when we stop eating. Then, the digestive system rests and the hunger disappears, replaced by dreams of food!

Let us pray together.

Lord, I believe that you have good things for me, please help me fast to create, maintain and increase my spiritual thirst. Teach me to desire your word more than anything else, in the name of Jesus, AMEN

David Théry

Practical teachings to experience God