What I Learned from Fasting for 21 Days

Almost every year since I've accepted Christ into my life, I participate in a 21-day fast and prayer organised by my church that occurs before Easter. It's a time when I surrender what's important to me—what seems to be fueling me from day to day—to consciously make time for God. The whole point is to learn how to rely on God more than the things that seem to keep us going (like food and coffee, etc).

Here's how my fast looked like this year:

• I did a version of a 7AM - 7PM fast. Instead of 7AM, i would begin my fast at around 8 or 9AM, depending on when I've eaten breakfast, then breaking fast at 7PM. I didn't have any food or water within these hours.
• For the rest of the day, I also refrained from drinking coffee and eating desserts. 
• I also had the choice to fast non-food items that were equally as important to me, so I fasted social media (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter) and Netflix.

disclaimer: I choose my type of fasting based on what I did the year before—usually one level harder, to make sure that it's not something I'm accustomed to, or rather, something easy. Because then I would just end up relying on myself.

So, here's what i learned from fasting for 21 days:

1. I don't actually like reading the books I have
   This was one of the things I realised really early on during my fast. Since I couldn't watch shows on Netflix, I had to find other things to do, so the first place I looked was in my bookshelf, and I powered through my comics really quickly. Then it dawned upon me: I had been buying books out of guilt.
   
   Specifically, the guilt of having to be "the literature graduate". I collected a number of literary classics and canons with the thought of I should be reading this, but because I wasn't 100% interested in them in the first place, they were just left in my bookshelves. I promised myself to start buying books that I would love to finish at least once.



2. I haven't been using my time wisely
   Sundays felt like a complete void. I couldn't hang out with friends because it would mean spending time together eating something, and I couldn't watch movies on Netflix to pass the time either. I realised I had been spending a lot of time just being idle or distracted.
   
   Weeknights were the same too—I had been spending hours every night just scrolling past things I barely cared about, just because it was a thing to do.



3. I've been trying to numb myself
   This one comes as no surprise to me. I know that I've always used any forms of media as an excuse to numb myself from thinking or feeling stuff. Without these distractions, I was forced to face whatever was on my mind and in my heart. I tried to take more time to reflect, to pray, to think and feel deeply.



4. I've forgotten how to deal with boredom
   Here's my choice of poison when it comes to dealing with boredom: binge-eating and binge-watching series. When I ran out of interesting books to read and became extremely bored, everything became uninteresting. Painting, drawing, writing—it all felt too difficult of a task to even start.
   
   I was so used to passively feeding myself with information, that I've forgotten how to churn them out. I realised that so many of us are living like this, and creativity found it hard to flow because we didn't allow for ourselves to do "harder things".



5. Why do I even post on social media?
   This became practically the thought that plagued me over the 21 days. I realised people were posting about their lives all the time because everything has become so disposable and quickly forgotten. Nothing lasts on social media, and nothing seems to be treasured, even though we continue to fill our collections with things that seem to reserve a special place in our devices.
   
   I suddenly realised that I had been, like most people, posting on social media because everyone else was on it. I didn't have a solid reason to be on it for so many hours on end. I'm not an influencer with a job on social media. To my own disappointment, neither am I sharing particularly inspiring messages with the world as I've set out to. I was just... there.

Fasting taught me about time. Prayer taught me about being quiet with God. Being still. Doing the fast and prayer this year has changed my perspective on social media and books quite a bit. I'm happy to report to you (and myself) that though I still find myself scrolling through Instagram mindlessly these days, I have been reading a lot more than I did last year, and I'm making it a point to record the number of books I've bought and read too. (It's at around 15 books now!)

What are your thoughts on fasting? Would you ever give it a go?