Day 4

It's kind of hard to imagine that I'm in my fourth day now. I guess since I've done it for the past seven years or so, it's not nearly as stressful or mentally consuming that it used to be.
I will say one thing; yesterday I definitely got over a hump. I woke up feeling kind of weak and "sickly," but it's that sickly particularly associated with what I'm doing. Basically, a sickly where you can just feel your body trying to purge itself of all the crud, but kind of struggling to do so. So I drank some prune juice, and a few other juices, and I felt much better after an hour or so.
Anyway, well when I woke up today I actually felt pretty great! And if you can believe it, I actually have a pretty good amount of energy right now!

So with all of that in mind, I'm really glad to be on this fast. I'm kind of truckin along, getting kind of in the groove of doing it, and when I have prayed and read for the past couple days, it has just been so intimate. I can just feel, or sense, whatever, God moving in my life during this time.

Anyway, after having said all this I feel I need to interject something. That is, many of us are hyper sensitive to someone mentioning to anyone that they're fasting, because we fear the boasting that Jesus critiqued in Matthew 6. Well, the thing about that passage is that Jesus criticizes the Pharisees for going overboard trying to draw attention to themselves (disfiguring their faces, even). But in writing this blog about fasting today, I promise you that that is not my intention. I kind of just want to blog each day maybe, from here on out, to kind of describe to whoever's reading this what it's like to live through a longer fast, day by day. I promise I'm not trying to do anything other than just document my experience, and thereby hopefully help any of you combat any fears or reserves you may have about fasting. To let you know that even a skinny guy like me can fast for a while and still have plenty of energy and joy in his day to day life to truly enjoy it, to truly get closer to God, and not begrudgingly suffer through every day.

So a last more technical fasting thought for the day:
Now that it's day 4, my stomach (everyone's a bit different) has moved past the ability to drink straight juice. It's too strong and well uh....wants to flush right through if I drink too much of it ;-). This is because anyone can fast about 3 days and after the third day pretty much go back to eating whatever they want. You might want to take it easy for like the first meal, but you're probably fine. But after that third day usually, your stomach really begins to alter into "fasting mode" and you need to take it a bit easier with what you drink. For me, it's simply watering down my juice a little bit. *However, I DO NOT water down my gatorade. I've never had to do that, and the one year I tried doing that, the watered down gatorade really screwed my stomach up. So anyway, those are some brief fasting "ideas." Maybe tomorrow, or at least at some point, I'll probably go more in depth about fasting as a whole.