Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread

I stopped praying over my food a long time ago. I didn't see the point. I didn't see any change whether I prayed over it or not, and I certainly didn't understand the words dropping by rote from my lips.

Dear God, thank You for this food. Please bless this food to our bodies. In Jesus' Name, amen.

Hear me clearly, there is no blame to be assigned here. I simply didn't understand what it meant. To me, the words were so meaningless, I might as well have chanted gibberish. The prayer had become empty "magical words" and that felt terribly wrong. I believed in God, and it seemed a great disservice to chant words at Him that had no meaning. Between that sense and a creeping apathy, I stopped praying over my meals.

What does prayer even do?

I'd seen it sometimes. People would tell me that when I prayed for them, my hands got hot. Sometimes peoples' physical symptoms eased when I prayed. Sometimes a peace came on them. When I prayed together with others over someone, I assumed good things happened because prayer just worked better when multiple people were involved. When it was only me and the person I prayed for, I figured it was a fluke. Good things happening in response to prayer always looked like flukes when they were spaced that far apart in my life.

Often I'd be asked to pray for some important event or ministry trip, but so many people were already praying and God's hand seemed to be so powerfully upon said event or trip that it didn't seem to matter one way or the other if I prayed. Did it matter? Would my prayer tip some balance? Were any of the prayers doing anything, or did God's determination to be involved this time outweigh any prayer?

Besides all that, I could list off to you all the times praying did nothing. Those non-events still sit like scarred-over wounds in my timeline.

So what does prayer do? Does it even work? And how?

Pause. Put a pin in that thought. Jump the tracks with me.

My husband Sergey and I have been on an arduous journey to exercise and eat better in order to trade weight for bodily health. There have been many dead ends and experiments that didn't work, but we keep coming closer to the answer that works best for us with each tweak we incorporate.

At the moment, the best strategy we have is a 9-10 day stretch of morning exercise, 1 meal for the day (plus tea or cocoa) and fasting until the next day's meal. This is a strategy that has come to us after much trial and error in an effort to correct the effects of lifelong overeating. We also look forward to feasting days, the times when we get to go to town, chowing down on whatever we'd like for the day or two in between these leaner stretches.

On the one meal days, it is rough. I've had days when I crave salt and vinegar chips so badly I can smell them on my fingertips. There's headaches and sluggishness. There's light-headedness and brain fog. There's hunger pangs keeping us up. But the more either of us gives in and goes for that extra small bite, the longer we run in place on our way toward the goal. Even so, there always comes a point when we don't seem to be able to stop ourselves for reaching for a small something to relieve the symptoms. Then we end up gaining nothing for our efforts month after month.

On the feast days, we can easily--and often do--eat ourselves sick. There's always just a few more bites, or those two or three snacks we haven't had in ages that we could make just a little more room for, or that last half pint of ice cream. The pleasure is delightful for a while, but the regret comes hot and fast when we're uncomfortable, sometimes to the point of nausea or bloat. In the past, this state has coupled with other issues I have to produce violent anxiety attacks. And yet, no matter how many times both of us lament that the last few bites weren't worth it, and that we didn't even enjoy them, and that we KNEW we were right at the edge, neither of us seems to be able to stop ourselves. We feel so bad in our bodies that we welcome running back to the leaner diet periods.

Pause. Take that thought. Tie it back around.

I started wondering more intently about prayer after reading Defeating Dark Angels by Charles Kraft. He seemed emphatic that it does things, like most other strong Christians I know. What he'd said had already had a practical effect on my day to day life, so I wondered about prayer.

Start small, I thought. I sidled up to Sergey and proposed that we start praying over our meals, but that we start praying something that had a very specific meaning for us. So, on one-meal days we pray something like: Thank you God for this good food. Please help us to not eat more than we need to today. In Jesus' Name, amen.

On feasting days we pray something like: Thank You, God, for this good food. May we enjoy everything we eat and drink, but may we not eat or drink too much. In Jesus' Name, amen.

In the several weeks since we've begun praying like this, Sergey and I have distilled the experience down to this idea: the edge of compulsion is gone.

On the one-meal days, the hunger pangs are now small enough that I can fall asleep on them. The cravings are soft, quiet yearnings that I can easily turn away from if I so choose. I am easier able to cluster my food into one 3 hour chunk of the day and go until the next day without dipping into a bag of trail mix or grabbing apples from the fridge. Sergey has reported similar experiences.

On the feast days, we see the line where we're about to make ourselves uncomfortable, and find that we can set food aside. We do not have to finish. We do not have to eat that extra snack. We can make ourselves stop and put it back in the fridge for next time.

Today I stopped and asked myself the question, could I be fooling myself? Am I just making the hard change all by myself and claiming that prayer did something?

And the answer swiftly comes back, no. How many nights did I lie on the couch, stomach roiling with nausea, nearly crying from full body tension and anxiety because, for the umpteenth time, I just couldn't stop myself from eating a little bit more? How many times did I damn myself for being unable to learn a simple lesson like, stop when you're almost full? How often did I wonder if this was my just punishment for being an absolute glutton?

For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do--this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it. So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me.

For in my inner being I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death?

Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God's law, but in my sinful nature a slave to the law of sin.
--Romans 7:19-25

No, I could not just make the change myself. An edge of compulsion is now missing, and a portion of my own will has been restored to me. The good I want to do, I now can do.

For the first time, two passages of scripture spring into full color for me: the aforementioned passage, and a tiny sliver of the Lord's Prayer. I always thought that "Give us this day our daily bread" was a plea for sustenance out of a place of lack. It can also, just as easily, be the plea from a recovering glutton, asking God for no more than what is needed for the day and the willpower to stay that course.

What does prayer even do?

I begin to see the answer. And as I see it, there is another shift. Once again, I begin to hear deep pain and despair from many people around me that I deeply love.

For a long time, because of my own wounds, I did not look far outside myself. The few times that I did, I listened and then tried to let the stories flow past me as best I could, telling myself that there wasn't anything I could do, and that trying would result in nothing more than my own spirit being battered and bruised again. I withdrew. I recovered. I gained some strength.

And there it is again. The endless stream of need I can do nothing for but sit and grieve over.

Nothing?

What does prayer even do?

Let's find out.