Eat

All at once an angel touched him and said, ‘Get up and eat’ (1 Kings 19:5).

Lent is known as a season of fasting. Traditionally, it means skipping a meal one day a week or no meat on specific days. But over the years, this has been expanded. Now people fast from sweets or sugar, entertainment, technology, or social media. Today, just about anything can be fasted from during Lent.

The command to Elijah was to eat. His body was weak, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. He needed sustenance to go on. That is rarely our problem. If anything, we can be guilty of wasting more food in a day than some have the opportunity to eat in a week.

The idea of fasting, or giving something up, even for a brief season, seems very contrary to human nature. We love to indulge. Ice cream. Steak. Chocolates. Pizza. French fries. Cookies. Truth be told, we love to overindulge.

And while the sacrifice of fasting can be difficult, it is often so because we keep the focus on what we have given up. Amazingly, telling ourselves we can’t have something only makes us want it more. It becomes all-consuming, a thought or desire we can’t seem to shake, like a broken record that plays the same 10 seconds of a song over and over again.

God offers to us something in our fasting that we often cannot receive during seasons of feasting. We become more aware of his presence, more in tune with his voice, more sensitive to his promptings. And in reality, we aren’t really giving up that much when you consider what we are getting in return.

Jesus answered, ‘It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God’’ (Matthew 4:4).