Everybody Else Seems To Know How This Works

He has a face he does now. He developed it about three years ago and it has served him well.

It is the face you make when somebody says something at the front and the room goes quiet and a few people say amen. It is warm and slightly serious and it can mean anything at all, and he uses it every time this subject comes up, because it buys him out of a conversation he does not know how to have.

There is a woman two rows over who talks about this the way other people talk about swimming. Just plainly, like a thing you do. There is a man at the back who has been at it thirty years. And there is him, with the face, who has never once understood what anybody is actually describing, and who is now three years too far in to say so.

The thing he could not tell you, and would not, is that he does not feel like an outsider because of God. He feels like an outsider because of a room.

That is worth separating out, and it is what this page is for.

Come and sit down at the end of this table. Nobody here is going to ask you a follow up question.

Nobody in that room is grading you, including the ones who look like they might be

Let us start with the room, because that is where the ache actually is.

The woman two rows over is not describing an achievement. She is describing her ordinary week in the only words she has. The man at the back is not a standard. He is a man who has done a thing for a long time, which tells you about his years and nothing whatever about your standing.

And most of the people making the face are making the face. That is the part nobody says out loud. A room of people quietly assuming everybody else has the instructions is the most common room in church life, and it is astonishingly durable, because the assumption keeps everybody quiet, and the quiet confirms the assumption.

You are not the only one, and you are not behind anybody. I am not being kind to you: the written word says that God is no respecter of persons (Acts 10:34), which means there is no ranking in the room He is looking at, and the Holy Spirit is what makes that steady in a man who has been comparing himself with a whole congregation for three years.

What Scripture does with people who are not sure

Now the thing that settles it, and it is not about fasting at all.

Wherefore receive ye one another, as Christ also received us to the glory of God.Romans 15:7

That sentence sits in the middle of a chapter about people in the same church doing the same practices differently, some with confidence and some without, some certain and some not sure at all. Paul's instruction is not that the unsure ones get up to speed. It is that everybody receives everybody, on the pattern of how Christ received them.

And how did He receive you? Not on the strength of your understanding. You did not arrive with the instructions either.

You are received as you actually are, and being unsure is not a lower tier of belonging. The written word says him that is weak in the faith receive ye, but not to doubtful disputations (Romans 14:1), which is a direct instruction not to make the unsure person defend themselves, and the Spirit is the one who makes that true of a room even when the room has not noticed.

And the group version is not the superior kind

Let me guard something, because a page about doing this together could easily make the solitary reader feel worse.

A church wide fast is not a better version of anything. Praying with people is good, and praying alone is good, and there is nothing in Scripture that ranks them. If you are not part of a group doing this, you are not missing a stronger form of it. If you are, you are not in an advanced class.

Nothing on this page is asking you to sign up to anything, and there is no group, program or event being described. There is no length here, no kind of fast and no schedule, because there never is on this site.

And plainly: some people must not go without food at all. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with food or eating, if you are underweight, unwell, frail or elderly, or if you are simply not sure, then speak to your doctor first and let their answer stand. Sitting in a room where everybody else is going without and eating your lunch because your doctor said so is not a smaller kind of belonging. It is not any kind of smaller. It is written that God is no respecter of persons (Acts 10:34), and the same Spirit is given to the person eating their lunch as to anybody else in that room.

You are fully inside all of this, and you were never at the edge of it because of what your body allows. 2 Corinthians 8:12 settles that, where God receives according to what a person actually has, and the Holy Spirit is not distributed by attendance or by health.

If today has more weight in it than a page can carry, call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight.