Our church had a voluntary day of prayer and fasting Wednesday. Some of us opened and closed the day with a short prayer meeting, and went out for a meal afterwards. Here are some concluding thoughts:
It was much easier with a group than it would have been to do this on my own. The feeling that “we’re in this together” helped out immensely. I don’t think I would have done it on my own.
Going without food was not nearly as hard as I thought it would be. I expected to have hunger pangs throughout the day and that every minute would be a battle of the will. The only time I felt slightly bad was right before lunch, but there was no question of breaking the fast then.
It did give me a greater awareness of the need to pray and the desire to pray. Since the day was to be focused on prayer, I thought more often of the need to pray and ways to pray. I wasn’t able to spend that much time in prayer because I had a full day’s worth of work to accomplish, but I was able to “fill in the corners” of my schedule.
Thoughts for next time:
I would prepare more in advance through planning times and material for meditation and prayer. This would have made a great difference.
I would attempt to get work done in advance so that I could devote more time to prayer. I didn’t realize that to be as effective as possible, planning should go into this for how to make the time to devote the day to prayer and preparation in how to invest the time.
Half Baked 