How is your Lenten fast going?
If you're anything like me, two weeks into Lent, you've already broken your fast a few times.
Whether by accident or neglect—and I've been guilty of both so far—breaking a fast is often evidence of how deeply a thing controls you, taking your or my attention away from God.
And yet, there's a subtle challenge to what we do with ourselves, with our hearts, when we break a fast before its prescribed end. How we respond to breaking our fasts, by accident or deliberate fault, reveals why we were fasting in the first place.
Did that first slip, when you reached for the remote or the coffee or whatever it was that you had given up, bring with it guilt and self-condemnation? Did you spend the rest of the day berating yourself for your lack of control or the way you'd let that particular thing become an idol in your life?
Or did you notice your fall with both grace and sorrow? Instead of self-flaggelation, did you turn to God in repentance and a renewed awareness of your frailty and dependence on Him?
As Richard Foster points out in his classic, Celebration of Discipline, the very first statement Jesus made about fasting dealt with the question of motive. "To use good things to our own ends is always the sign of false religion," he writes. "How easy it is to take something like fasting and try to use it to get God to do what we want."
Whether we want freedom from something that takes our attention away from Him (a good thing!) or we want Him to do something for us (manipulation), it's important to remember that our Lenten fasts are about worshipping God, not changing ourselves by dint of our own discipline.
And with that reminder comes freedom.
Yes, it would be better if you or I didn't fall into the temptation of eating that piece of chocolate, but this is about God, not about us. And as He promises in Romans 8:28, in all things God works to the good of those who love Him. If we keep our eyes on Him, even our stumbles become reminders that His good for us is so much better than our own.