How fasting can produce a spiritually healthy diet
Limousine on the farm? I stared at the email sender as I pictured a fancy car showing up right in the center of my cow field. I quickly realized that Limousine was the name of the breed of cows that we purchased, and they were arriving - today. Two were coal black, smooth as velvet. The third was black with some white coloring in the face, like an Oreo cookie. They walked off the trailer and onto my field together in search of the best food, like vacationers looking for the best restaurant in town. They wanted the best food at the cheapest price.
“These cows will eat like children,” Muncey warns.
He elaborated, “They will find the sweetest food on their plate and eat it first. If they are still hungry, then they will go back for the rest of the food on the plate.”
I was a bit puzzled because I looked at the cow field as simply a pasture full of grass. Muncey must have seen the ‘deer in the headlights’ look on my face. He lumbered over to a stalk of grass rising above the top of his boot with a big head on it.
“This is Timothy grass. See how it is different from the Fescue next to it?” he continued.
Of course, it was easy to tell the difference – once someone pointed it out. Like a tour guide in an art museum, Muncey walked me around the pasture pointing out the different shapes and colors of various grasses. Os Guiness was right, “Comparison is the mother of clarity.” Little did I know that this pasture was really a big salad bowl, full of crabgrass, orchardgrass, Kentucky bluegrass and Johnson grass, among others. Muncey walked over to a small plant and picked off a red flower.
“This is red clover. The cows will eat this first, along with the Kentucky bluegrass. If you let them, they will go around your fields and pick out these sweets to eat and leave the other edible grasses that are not their favorites,” Muncy declared with authority.
“You need to make sure that they eat all of the grass, not just their favorite sweets. To do this, you place an electric line to hem in the cows. This will force them to eat ALL of the grass that is inside of that spot,” he explains. “Once they finish all that is inside that dinner plate, then you move them the next day to another spot,” he concludes.
Muncey demonstrated the process with electric lines that can be rolled onto spools. These made it easy to move the lines into the spots called ‘paddocks.’ This process is called rotational grazing – each day, I rotate the cows to a new spot so that they eat a healthy mix of grasses. If this is not done, they will simply pig out on their favorite sweets and leave the other parts of the salad on their plate.
The main benefit of rotational grazing is to ensure that the cows eat a balanced meal and also that they eat all of the grass that is available in the field. This is what farmers call “crop utilization rate.” If left to roam on a field, the cows will consume only 30% of the available grass. With rotational grazing, they will pig out on 60% of the available grass. This means that my cows will eat two times more of the available grass – in the end, the Limousine will cruise on this pasture, eating twice as much! All of the grass is converted to the growth and flourishing of my cows. Cows really are what they eat.
Aren’t people like that too? Healthy foods often produce healthy bodies. How about what we feed our minds and our spirit? Can healthy spiritual food create healthy spiritual growth? I am convinced this is true. The problem is that there is so much junk food available to feed our minds and spirits. We simply get distracted. As C.S. Lewis said, “We are too easily pleased.” Like cows eating the sweets first, we can be lazy consumers of spiritual food. A recent study (below) showed where Americans tend to get information from each day.
We are like cows set in front of a big pasture and told to peruse the field to find what we like. Most likely, we choose the sweets to eat and leave the other edible grasses that are not our favorites. In the end, our spiritual growth is stunted. What if we could increase our spiritual food intake from 30% to 60%? This requires rotational grazing.
Thinking about my church one day, I wondered how I could increase their ‘crop utilization.’ In other words, how could the church promote good grazing of healthy spiritual content instead of merely junk food? I think fasting provides a similar benefit as rotational grazing. Let me explain.
Fasting limits the voices that I pay attention to. I say to God, “Lord, I want to hear from you today more than I hear from anything else – including my stomach.” By eliminating other sources of information or guidance, fasting forces me to tune into God’s voice in prayer. Of course, fasting and prayer go together. If I just fast without prayer, then I merely go hungry that day. Fasting with prayer provides a hungry environment to hear God’s voice.
If you are afraid that your church is not hearing God’s voice amidst the many other voices from the media, call a fast. The time spend in fasting/prayer will stimulate their appetite for God. Like cows confined in a paddock, they will digest God’s word and receive what God has for them. Like various grasses in a pasture, Christians can feed on various portions of Scripture, or Christian biographies, maybe devotional reading, or uplifting songs. By excluding other media sources, we then devour what God has been offering to us but have simply been too busy or preoccupied to notice.
Give it a try.
You may find that this stimulates your appetite for further spiritual food. After all, we become what we eat.