“Fasting teaches us about our hunger, our dependency, our need for Christ.  Feasting, understood in the light of faith, teaches us about answered prayer, about a God who fills our emptiness and satisfies our hunger beyond our greatest imagining.” (page 100).

Feasting is good, it is healthy, it is communal.  When we feast, we are celebrating Christ with us!  Break out the good dishes and the cloth napkins!  Open the bottle of wine and bake some sugary yumminess!  To feast is to rejoice, it’s to be filled with joy, with God.  Fasting helps us to hunger.  Feasting satisfies our hunger.

In regards to our spiritual lives, I believe that there are dry or desert times that we all go through.  We may experience these times because of tough things we are going through, choices we’ve made or even for what may seem like no reason whatsoever.  However, what I have experienced is that after those dry times I come back and embrace my relationship with God more fully and more deeply.  God is the nourishment for our spiritual lives and when we turn from Him or lose sight of Him and then find Him again, it is sweet!  It is a reason to feast! Fasting is a tangible way of bringing that to light in our lives.  Fasting from food leaves us hungry, just as losing sight of God in our daily life leaves us hungry for Him.  When we return to the food we gave up it tastes so much sweeter or pleasurable than it did before, just as turning back to God satisfies us and fills us with sweet joy!  Now there have been times I’ve fasted from something and when I went to eat/drink it later I actually didn’t like it much anymore – that’s a sign that maybe it isn’t good for me.

I love the idea that when we are fasting it’s in preparation of the feast!  Consider that this Lent – as you fast it’s to be prepared to participate fully in the JOY of Easter! 

What will you fast from this Lent?

How will you feast this Easter?