For decades now I have practiced "giving up something for Lent" and I always find it a valuable exercise.
In studying up on fasting over the last few weeks, I came across a handful of Bible "experts" who looked down their noses at this practice as being "not a real fast". A true fast, they said, means eating no food and drinking nothing but water for 3, 7, 21 or 40 days. Not giving up soda for a few weeks.
Certainly, giving up chocolate for 40 days is not as hardcore as going without food altogether for 40 days. Still, I think you can get a lot of the benefits of fasting and experience a miniature version of a fast by giving up something for Lent.
The similarities include:
- The abstaining from a God-given good (like food in general or chocolate in particular) in pursuit of God's "even better"
- The enduring of temptations brought by bodily appetites
- The exercising of your self-control
- The focusing on the spiritual over the physical
- The emphasizing of prayer
And those are not things to pooh-pooh!
The Church should be encouraging experiences of God, not belittling or dismissing them.
Anytime we give up something to get more of God, it's a win.
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