I have a confession to make.
I really don’t want to make it, because it’s embarrassing and it makes me feel awful.
Therefore, I NEED to make this confession.
I said in an earlier video about fundraising that I was going to fast for 40 days. I was only going to eat white rice and drink water. I was 100% determined and convinced that I was going to do this. I created a chart in my journal to mark off day-by-day, I told my teammates and my squad mentor so they could help keep me accountable. 40 days was my goal and I was going to make it.
My confession: I made it five days. Five days of eating nothing but white rice and drinking water.
To tell you the truth, it wasn’t all horrible. It definitely sucked, but it could have been a lot worse. I trudged through the days and ate my rice, and I scratched it off on my chart. And it was 40 days, not forever. I could do this.
Except I was doing it for all of the wrong reasons.
I was doing it because I wanted to break myself of eating too much junk food, which I had reluctantly gotten in the habit of. I was doing it to prove to myself that I could go 40 days eating just white rice. I was doing it because I wanted to say that I had done it. And all of these were good reasons to do it to me, but none of them were right.
I didn’t pray anymore than I already did on a daily basis. I didn’t seek God anymore than I already had been. My schedule still looked the same everyday, I was just filling it with rice instead of other foods that I actually wanted.
The only real difference I could see was I was grumpier. Eating nothing but rice ended up putting me in a bad mood. And my bad mood turned into a bad head-space about the whole thing. And that bad head-space turned into a lot of negativity about myself.
I didn’t look any better. I didn’t feel any better. I wasn’t getting closer to God. I was avoiding the mirror. I wanted to down my entire jar of vitamins because it was the only thing with any taste. I completely regretted ever starting the fast.
I asked God what He thought about the fast and didn’t really get a straight answer. At least, not one that I was willing to hear.
On the fifth day I ate my hearty breakfast of white rice like all the days before and went to church that morning. I was planning on coming home and eating rice for lunch, but something deep inside me completely turned off. Some switch broke down, and it didn’t feel good. To tell you the truth, I don’t know what it was. All I know is I needed that switch to be on and it wasn’t going to happen if I kept going with this fast for the reasons I had conjured up.
So I broke that day. I went out to lunch with my team. I went to the grocery store and got actual food. I told myself that I broke because I had to, not because I wanted to, and therefore I didn’t fail.
But I felt like a total failure. I didn’t want to think about the fast, I didn’t want to talk about the fast, I wanted to go back in time and take back ever saying I would do it.
I’m still convinced I could pull off a 40 day fast. Call it what you want – stubbornness, denial – I could do it. But I wasn’t supposed to. I knew from the beginning I wasn’t supposed to. I tried to do it anyway, and made it five days. Not even five days. Four days and a third. Go me.
I’ve written in blogs in the past that I like to do things all by myself. I don’t want help, I want to do it. Alone. I tried paying for this trip on my own. Fail. I tried raising money for this trip on my own. Fail. I tried fasting on my own. Fail. You’d think I’d learn by now, right?
I honestly don’t know if I have learned yet. I hope so, but I can definitely see myself going off on my own again in the name of being able to do it by myself and completely failing yet again. But I DO know that even though He’ll let me do it on my own for a little while, probably highly amused at my stubbornness, God always has my back. I could tell Him to go away and that I got this, but He clearly knows better and sticks around despite the hundreds of times I tell Him to back off.
So the moral of the story is I still can’t do this on my own. Tried, didn’t work. I might try again, it still won’t work. But I serve a God who lets me try and try and try again and just picks me up every time and waits patiently for me to learn. Pretty cool, right?
