On Tuesday evening, Cassidy had a homework assignment to finish, but because we have an older version of Word on our home computer, she couldn’t open her file. At 6:30, Wednesday morning we arrived at church so she could use my office computer to complete the paper before school.

It was a cold, snowy morning. And as we walked from the parking lot to the door, a man who’d been walking down Midwest Road with his bicycle approached us. He explained to me that he was homeless and penniless and was on his way to somewhere he hoped would hire him as a day laborer. He asked if the church could help him. He had no money for food and he just wanted to get a little breakfast as he tried to get work that day.

Standing there in the snow and cold at 6:30am, I explained that our benevolence ministry was available on Friday mornings, that any cash or gift cards the church had available were locked in the safe and that I didn’t have access to them until the business office staff arrived later that morning.  The man rode off on his bike, still hungry and broke, and I went on about my day.

6 “Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:
to loose the chains of injustice
and untie the cords of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free
and break every yoke?

7 Is it not to share your food with the hungry
and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—
when you see the naked, to clothe him,
and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?
-Isaiah 58:6-7

This was a portion of the text I planned to use Wednesday evening to teach on “true fasting”.  As I began preparing for the service and read these words, my heart sank.  I had lost an opportunity to live out the very words I had planned to teach!

It would have easy to give the man a few dollars from my own pocket. It would have been a minor inconvenience to drive him to the nearest McDonalds and buy him breakfast. I did neither.  And now I stood in front of a group of people telling my story and admitting that I was unqualified to teach from this passage.

God definitely got my attention! May I never forget this lesson.

I encourage you to take time to read through Isaiah 58 and meditate on the type of true fasting it describes.  What lesson is it speaking to you?  Post your comments or observations…let’s open this up from a teaching to a discussion.