Fasting from activity

Crystal invited me to share with the group my experience in fasting from activity which I did for a few weeks last summer; she felt it seemed to fit well with the simplicity theme that has been the recent focus of the Kajiji Girls. What follows is my description of this experience, and at Friday's meeting Crystal has asked me to lead a discussion on this topic.
Blessings, Susan Arico


In the middle of August, 2006, I hit a wall. I had had six weeks of fun, exciting, wonderful, nonstop summer adventures that included travel, R&R, friendship, time with family, and the like. What it didn’t include was virtually any quiet time – with God or even on my own. When the last of the visitors left and my ‘normal life’ was on the cusp of resuming… I had a mini breakdown.

Journaling that day, I recorded that I felt a) exhausted, b) depressed, c) overwhelmed, d) alone, and e) fearful. I also noted that I didn’t like myself and felt unliked by others. I realized that all of these emotions and feelings were things I had brought onto myself by overextending myself significantly, but knowing this didn’t make me feel a bit better.

What made me feel worse was the fact that I had been in this place before. A lot. Different circumstances and events, different breaking points, maybe not the exact same end-result emotions… But close enough. This was a recurring pattern in my life. I would go, go, go, go, go, loading myself up (most often with good, exciting things that I wanted to be involved in) – and then eventually I would crash. After crashing I’d take a step back, catch my breathe, apply a few administrative and time-management tricks to my schedule, tell myself I’d try harder to over-do it less… and within months, I’d be back in the same place.

I was tired of it. And sitting alone with God making my list of how awful I felt, I realized that God was tired of it too. What good was I doing to either one of us? “What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, and yet lose his very self?” (Luke 9:25)

What I had to do, I decided, was get to the bottom of what was bringing me back to this place again and again. Why was I addicted to over-scheduling my life and taxing myself so heavily? What was driving me? How could I stop? I didn’t know the answers to these questions, but I did know that I had never really asked them deliberately before, and I had never tried to press into them to find the answers. Also I knew that God had the answers.

To force myself to take a bigger step back and take this nascent effort seriously, I decided to fast for two weeks. Fast not by using food, though, but fast by using time. The thing I needed to abstain from was not eating, but doing. For activity was what had a hold on my life, I realized – it was my driving force. Activity and productivity were my idols… not food, so an activity fast was the logical step. The free time this type of fast would grant me would enable me to make good on the commitment I made to God (while rehearsing my litany of woe during my wall-hitting moment) to seek Him, wait on Him, and make space for Him to meet me.

The “activities fast” began the next day. Basically it meant that I would not put any new appointments on my calendar that didn’t need to be there. The ones that were already there – a Bible study, a doctor’s appointment, a few work commitments, church – could stay. The point was not to be legalistic, just proactive. In essence, through the activities fast, I said to myself: “you will not take on any new activities for two weeks. You will keep quiet days and deliberately spend free time with God.” I did not watch any TV and I limited my reading in order to prioritize open space of mind and heart – and time to hear from God.

So for two weeks, I backed out of ‘normal life.’ I took a lot of long walks with my son in his jogging stroller. During his naps, I sat on the porch with the Bible and a journal and spent unharried time in the Word and in prayer.

It was a wonderful and fruitful time. I felt balanced and centered by the end of it. I felt grounded in God.

One of the main things I discovered was that I knew nothing of peace (inner peace, I mean, not the absence of armed conflict.) I had long known that productivity was an idol of mine and sought to fight it… but I had not made the connection between over-active life and lack of peace. During my fast, God made this connection clear. I saw that ‘peace’ was a word that I had pretty much ignored throughout my life.. Here it is, third fruit of the spirit – following only love and joy – and I basically didn’t know what it meant… let alone how to live it out.

So, in some of the free time my activities fast won me, I did a Bible-wide study on peace. I found that it means “total well-being and inner rest of spirit, in fellowship with God.”[1] This state of being is my inheritance as a child of Christ’s – and yet I have not acknowledged this inheritance. Worse, I have implicitly rejected it. It was this situation that God empowered me to explore, acknowledge, and repent of during my activities fast.

At one point during the fast, I was sitting quietly on our porch when my husband, who had been jogging, came up the driveway. “What’s wrong?” he called out as he approached. “Nothing; why?” I replied. “I just never see you sitting doing nothing,” he replied. “I figured something must be wrong.” That moment was a wake-up call for me. I do not want to be that woman, the peaceless one who never sits still – and God wants it even less than I do. That one moment was a picture of what God was doing for me and in me during my fast; He was allowing me to see myself more clearly, calling me to repentance, and teaching me how to live a godlier life. And a more pleasant fulfilling life, since (as I learned during my fast) peace and joy go hand in hand[2].

[1] NIV Study Guide, Zondervan
[2] Romans 14;17, 15:13