Good Friday

Fasting in all sorts of forms has been a central part of Lent and preparation for celebrating Easter, but I've managed to be either pregnant or nursing through five Lenten seasons now, so I'm a little out of practice. 

However, this morning gave me a new kind of perspective on the tradition of fasting. Despite my pregnancy (or rather because of it), this morning I was fasting. It was for the diabetes screening blood-work that they do around 28 weeks, but interestingly enough, it happened to fall on Good Friday, a day for remembering Christ's giving up himself and suffering, even dying on the cross for us. And I was struggling to remember.

My desire to eat everything (everything!) I laid eyes on was soooo strong that I had to close the fridge and get out of the kitchen! I practically threw the kids their breakfast and escaped to the other room. I just knew I wasn't strong enough to fight off the 'hunger bear' with all those Cheerios beckoning to me, so I had to get out of there. It got me thinking.

I've been realizing that the temptations I face are so small compared with what Christ faced, and yet He was strong to the end, even choosing to forgive the very ones who nailed Him to the cross. Where does this strength come from? His divinity. And yet, we are not tempted beyond what we can bear either, so why do we give into those desires to curse rather than bless, to indulge rather than abstain, to live lives less holy than God desires for us? 

I think fasting was such a good exercise for me in disciplining myself (even if the fast only lasted a couple hours) because there are few things in my life that I feel I 'need' right now more than food (and caffeine!), and it's amazing how much work it takes to focus on my family, on God, on anything other than myself. Let me tell you that satisfying my own selfish needs was TOP of my list, and yet I know that's not at all how God wants us to live. 

When I used to run track, we had these crazy bungee things to train us in sprints. We strapped ourselves to the bungees, and the idea was to hold back while the bungee was stretched taught, and then we'd run as it pulled us along, making us sprint faster and harder than we knew possible. Our muscles became accustomed to moving faster and faster, so that when we ran without them, we practically flew! Maybe that's what fasting is for. We train ourselves in harder-than-we-thought-imaginable circumstances to focus on God and others, so that when we are in the day-to-day, we can 'fly'. Maybe that's what God's plan was for Jesus  in the desert, and maybe that's what he wants for us as we prepare for Easter.