Hunger and half-hearted prayers: What a horrible fast taught me about true worship

I’ve built a lot of my faith on what things feel like. 

I’m not sure I noticed that until a Friday afternoon when all I could feel was hunger. 

It’s 3:17pm. I’m in the chair I keep for prayer, and I’m struggling. Half-formed sentences that trail off before they go anywhere. My head aches. Constant glancing at the kitchen. I know what I’m supposed to be doing. I chose this. I believe in it. But right now I feel more distracted from God than I do on a Tuesday morning answering emails. 

Because I’m hungry.

Six weeks in. A small group of us, fasting every Friday, trying to recover something the early church seemed to have found. We wanted to know what it felt like from the inside.

Someone asked the question I didn’t really want to answer. “Did you feel closer to God?” I paused longer than was comfortable. The room had that particular church-group stillness. Everyone performing patience, waiting to hear whether someone else would go first.

“No,” I said. “I just felt hungry.”

A few nervous laughs. Then something shifted in the room, not relief exactly, but recognition. I watched it move across the faces. One woman looked down. The man who’d been most enthusiastic at the start exhaled slowly through his nose. Nobody rushed to correct me or offer a better experience. They just sat with it.

That silence told me more than the laughs did.

We’d all been expecting something. A vision, a word, anything. The fasting was supposed to produce what the early church had found. Instead, we’d produced six weeks of headaches, distracted prayers, and a quiet disappointment.

I drove home, made toast, and ate it standing at the counter. Nothing shifted.

Sustained by suffering

A few days later, I was in my daily devotions when I came across a quote from Theophan the Recluse, a 19th-century Russian monk. I nearly moved past it.

“Those who proceed without suffering will bear no fruit. Many are out of communion with the Holy Spirit because they have turned aside from suffering.”

My first instinct was irritation. I wanted no part of Christian masochism that mistakes grimness for holiness. So I put the book down.

But then I kept returning to it, not because it comforted me, but because it was pressing on something sharp I needed to face. Theophan wasn’t saying suffering is good. But those who wait for the feeling to arrive before they’ll call it real, may be waiting for something other than God. The absence of feeling might not be evidence something had gone wrong. It might be exactly where the thing happens.

I wasn’t sure I believed that. But I wasn’t sure I didn’t.

A Sunday service. My favourite song. Hands raised without thinking about it. Something moving through my chest that I’d have called, without hesitation, the presence of God. I’d never questioned that. Why would I?

It felt real. It felt like arrival.

Those who wait for the feeling to arrive before they’ll call it real, may be waiting for something other than God

But sitting with Theophan on a flat, hungry Friday, I found myself wrestling with a thought I didn’t want to acknowledge. How much of that was God? How much was just a song, played well, in a room full of people feeling the same thing?

That was the uncomfortable part. Every prayer, every service quietly measured against that feeling. Anything less got filed, without my quiet noticing, as less. As not quite the real thing.

Worship that costs

Then a familiar verse caught in a way it hadn’t before.

“Offer your bodies as a living sacrifice.”

I’d read Romans 12 hundreds of times. Preached it. Thought I knew what it said. I’d always read bodies as near-metaphor. Present yourself wholly and orient your will toward God. That morning the word landed differently. More literally. Less spiritual focus or good intentions. And more flesh. The hungry, headachy, scattered flesh that shows up anyway.

Being offered as a living sacrifice.

That’s exactly how those fasting days felt. Limping through with a stinging headache, praying something that barely qualified as prayer. No eloquence. Nothing that felt spiritually alive. Just a body, offered.

I kept coming back to it.

In the supermarket, in traffic, waiting for nothing in particular. A body, offered. The hungry, distracted, scattered body. The one that shows up anyway.

It took me a while to see it. That the limping might not be the obstacle to worship. It might be the thing itself.

Then Paul goes further. He calls this the true and proper worship. The worship that costs something, not the kind that feels good. The worship offered by a body that would rather be elsewhere, but shows up anyway.

The reflex hasn’t gone. I still catch myself at the end of a fast, running the quiet audit: did anything happen?

The fasting still doesn’t make me feel good. But I’m not sure that was ever the point.