Lost Art of Fasting Blog

Have you ever heard of Atychiphobia? It's the technical term for the fear of failure. Atychiphobia is a chronic, intense fear of failure that approximately 5% of the population has been diagnosed with. However, other surveys say that nearly 1 in 3 Americans suffer from fear of failure. It's almost certainly one of the most popular reasons why people do not engage in fasting.

Think back to the last thing you had a deep determination about. Yes, before your curiosity about fasting. Now, think about what barriers or hindrances you faced as you committed to what you were determined to do. What were the limiting factors? How did you overcome them?

Some might describe their fasting experience like "Hell Week" for Navy SEAL training.  A Navy SEAL might argue that point, but it's easy for a reasonable person to make the correlation. As Marcus Luttrell described in his book Lone Survivor, Hell Week was five days of the most grueling physical testing the human body can handle. Running on sand, swimming in freezing water, carrying boats, with endless hours of push-ups, sit-ups, and flutter kicks. And if you don't want to go through it, you don't have to. There's a bell placed stationary everywhere the SEALs go. All you have to do is break rank, walk up, and ring the bell, and you're done.

To reward or not to reward - that is the question!

There are a hundred articles out there about fasting. Why is this going to be any different? The more people that talk about fasting, the reasons, the benefits, and what happens in and through us when we discipline ourselves to fast, perhaps it won't be the least used spiritual practice given to us in the Scriptures.

Like many parents, when I was preparing to have my first child, I wanted to be armed with all the information I could to be a good dad. I didn't want to make any mistakes, I wanted to be supportive to my wife, and the list goes on. The advice that was given to me, that I now give to other first-time dads, is that there is no manual or book on becoming a dad. You must take it one day at a time and allow God, your wife, and that child to teach you. When I think about my first fasts, I felt like the information was similar. But as I obeyed the Lord in doing it, I realized...these moments don't need to be treated the same way.