Lent Day 16: Prayer | Scriptures + A New Hunger

And if you give yourself to the hungry, and satisfy the desire of the afflicted, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday. – Isaiah 58:10

Wedding Feast of the Lamb, by Sheridan Waldrop

But if your enemy is hungry, feed him, and if he is thirsty, give him a drink.
Romans 12:20

To this present hour we are both hungry and thirsty, and are poorly clothed, and are roughly treated, and are homeless.
1 Corinthians 4:11

I have been in labor and hardship, through many sleepless nights, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure.
2 Corinthians 11:27

Men do not despise a thief if he steals
To satisfy himself when he is hungry.
Proverbs 6:30

For I was hungry, and you gave Me something to eat; I was thirsty,
and you gave Me something to drink; I was a stranger, and you invited Me in.
Matthew 25:35

[On that great day] they will hunger no longer, nor thirst anymore; nor will the sun beat down on them, nor any heat.
Revelation 7:16

We are doing two things today: nourishing our souls with scripture and choosing an embodied, imaginative prayer exercise.

Take a moment to slow down and read and re-read these verses above. This is what God’s word says about hunger explicitly. To see some of the verses collected at once and read together, it does tell a story of God’s heart.

Most of us reading this do not suffer from food scarcity or inaccessibility to nutritious food. We hold our abundance while laying down one “G” and picking up two “G’s.” We lay down guilt that leads nowhere. We pickup gratitude and generosity with conviction..

Our Saturday practice in our series is to bring the topic of the week into conversation with God. Around this particular topic, we want to suggest a focused engagement around the Lenten tradition of fasting, possibly in ways that you have before or in ways that might be new. But the focus is that of intercession and enacting the conversation with God. We offer four ideas below.

Consider options like these to engage creatively in prayer:

Fast for a week from using a credit card for food and beverage purchases.
Retrieve cash and manage its use during the week as an act of solidarity with those who live below the poverty line and function paycheck to paycheck, forced to live in a cash based world. Allow it to prompt you in prayer for M25i ministries like New Garden Farm in North Carolina and Living Edge in Victoria, Canada who are offering fresh food and produce that isn’t canned or processed.

Fast from eating mindlessly or quickly.
Dedicate a series of meals to taking every bite slowly. Savor the textures and flavors and smells. And with each bite pray through some of the reflections and awareness from this week. Pray around the verses above. Thank God for contemplative activists who give themselves to the repetitive work of meal requisition and meal preparation and meal sharing.

Fast a meal or two such that you feel hunger, and brain fog, and the irritability that comes with your body not being able to function well.
Allow all those multiple moments of awareness to cause you to pray for children in schools who rely on school meals to function academically. And pray for those on the streets who might struggle to problem solve. Pray for the single mothers who, in stress, are choosing to buy fast food so that she can pay for heating in her apartment for this month.

Fast for a meal, and during that time of the day, seek out the honor of serving food at a food kitchen that offers the possibility of conversations and relational engagement among those enjoying the meal. We see it as not a chance to pat ourselves on the back because we “did a good deed,” but as an opportunity to be near Christ, to gaze at the face of someone imprinted with God’s image who can’t access a cooked meal easily, to listen to the voice of someone whose challenges might be very different than ours, and who might be able to teach us about our own different forms of hunger.

Whether you choose one of these fasting ideas or a different one, consider this being the week that you engage in almsgiving as well, to embrace the full triad of Lenten practices.

You have prayed in intercession
You have fasted in solidarity
And now you invite your heart to follow your finances. "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also" (Matthew 6:21).