This Is How I Fast

​Our church used the month of January as a fasting exercise. It was connected to a much bigger project but each of us was expected to participate by choosing one day during the month to fast. A calendar was passed around and I chose January 31st. The instructions were fairly basic, ‘fast’ yourself from something that keeps your attention that you can go without for a day. Also, pray for one another and the church.
 
My wife, Brenda is a very serious studier. I am much less so, but I did pay attention to her discussions about fasting. She chose to fast from food but only from sun up to sundown, as per Biblical study material she had used for reference. I chose to fast from the internet. As my home-based business is 100-percent dependent on the world-wide web, I decided something like that I would actually feel and notice.
 
I actually stayed off the internet for a complete 24 hour period from 9:00 PM January 30th to 9:00 PM on January 31st. I spent the day hanging out with Bren. We spent the entire day watching DVDs and relaxing. While she was still ‘connected’ to the internet, she didn’t spend time online in my presence and did me a favour by not telling me anything she had been reading on her news feeds. It was a big help to me.
 
But I wanted to look into fasting a bit deeper. With some of my freelance writing work I have written a number of articles on fasting diets – intermittent eating programs as they are often called. I know that restricting your food intake for an extended period of time is not good for our health so that is why I chose to fast from the internet on my chosen day. In fact, there is nothing in Scripture that commands Christians to fast.
 
GotQuestions.org explains it well with this statement: “Too often, the focus of fasting is on the lack of food. Instead, the purpose of fasting should be to take your eyes off the things of this world to focus completely on God.” That was why I used the one thing that more or less controls my working day as the item to pull myself away from for a day. It actually was much easier than I thought it would be and it showed me something else.
 
I am now pulling myself away from the internet more frequently during an average day. Sure, there are days when I need to spend a full day in the home office on writing projects, but I don’t have the computer connected to the ‘net when I’m doing that. Now I basically do a series of ‘checks’ online of matters that either concern or interest me and leave it at that. In a way, I am still fasting and trying to put more of God in that place.