Broken By Wednesday

She announced it in the prayer meeting, which is where she always announces it, and she meant every word.

Twenty one days. She had read something. It made sense to her and it moved her and she stood up in a room of about forty people and said what she was going to do, and several people said amen, and one woman said she would join her, which turned out to matter later in a way neither of them expected.

Sunday: strong. Monday: strong, a headache by four but strong. Tuesday: strong until about nine at night, and then a long stretch of lying in bed doing arithmetic about how many hours were left.

Wednesday at half past twelve she ate a sandwich in her car in a supermarket car park and did not taste any of it.

That was the sixth time. Twice it was twenty one days, once it was a week, once it was Daniel, once it was something she had made up herself. Six announcements. Six Wednesdays. She has not made it past a Thursday since she was thirty.

And here is what happens next, and it is the actual subject of this article. On the following Sunday she goes back into that building and she sits somewhere she does not normally sit.

The woman who joined her does not ask. She would not. And that is somehow worse, because now there are two people in that room carrying a thing neither of them will name, and one of them is doing arithmetic about whether the other one made it.

She has never once said out loud what she believes about herself on those Sundays. But she moves seats, and the seat tells you.

Look at the fast He actually chose

There is a chapter in Isaiah where God takes a nation apart for fasting well and living badly, and then, having done that, He describes what He was after all along. And it is not what anybody expects.

Is not this the fast that I have chosen? to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke.Isaiah 58:6

Hear that in the seat you moved to. You are not carrying a debt out of that car park. The word says the fast He chose is to undo the heavy burdens, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the undoing, which is why a fast that lays one on you has missed.

Read the list. Loose the bands. Undo the heavy burdens. Let the oppressed go free. Break every yoke.

Not one item on it is about your stomach and not one item on it is about your stamina. Every single thing in that verse is weight coming off somebody.

Which puts a question in front of the whole practice. If the fast God named is about burdens coming off, what exactly is a fast doing if it lays a fresh one on the person keeping it?

So take this in that seat you moved to, and know it is not my comfort, it is what is written: you are not in arrears with God, right now, as you read this, and no broken fast has ever moved your standing by a millimetre. His word says there is no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and it is the Holy Spirit and not a Wednesday who bears witness that you belong to Him.

Christ bought your standing. It was expensive and it is finished and there is nothing left to put down.

There was a man in England in the seventeen hundreds who fasted twice a week for decades and who is quoted about it constantly. Here is what gets left out.

He built a movement out of practices small enough for servant girls and coal miners.

Short readings. Six people in a room at whatever hour their work allowed. A handful of plain questions asked out loud. He never handed a laborer his own private discipline and called it the mark of a serious believer, because he understood something that gets lost the moment a practice becomes public: the size of a rule is not the measure of a heart.

The name that got fixed on those people started as a joke about how methodical they were. They kept it, because it was accurate.

A warmed heart with no method cools. A method with no warmth is only a schedule. He held both, and the method survived because it was built to be kept, not to be admired.

Yours was built to be announced. That is the whole difference, and it is not a character flaw, it is a design fault, and design faults are fixable in an afternoon.