Yeah, that's one of the immediately gratifying things about fasting: instant weight loss. The only problem with it is that after the fast your body remembers that it was starving, hoards the nourishment you give it, and you gain weight that much faster. So you have to really cut down on the eating, after the fast, if you want to stay skinny. Jerry Falwell did 2 40-day fasts in the last few years, and he's just as porky now as he's always been. I was skinny all my life, till my early 40's. Here's hoping I can be more disciplined in the future.
The third day of these things have always been particularly difficult for me, and this time was no exception. But I feel fairly tough mentally, and am cautiously optimistic that I can keep this up for another...how many days? 21? Yikes. Oh well. A lot of people do this for 40 days and swear that it isn't very difficult. I only know personally one person who went 40 days while I was around him, and it was incredibly difficult for him. I suspect that not eating is not all that difficult after the first 7 days or so, but the spiritual part of it is hard. We have an enemy who is aware of the power God can release through this discipline, and he'll do what he can to mess us up.
I have to confess that I am not getting up for early morning walks like I planned. Here's hoping I can start that. It's been chilly in the morning and you're a lot more sensitive to the cold when you don't eat.
Here are some interesting thoughts from the Iraqi blog "Iraq the Model," which can be found here. (This is in reference to the huge bomb that went off in the market a couple days ago that killed over 100 people.):
"I was with a friend on our way home yesterday when we were shocked by the sound of a powerful explosion. We looked in all directions trying to figure out where it was but there was nothing to indicate where the bomb, or whatever it was, went off...Soon a plume of thick smoke was rising from the ground... Minutes later I saw the first reports on TV talking about a huge explosion in al-Sadriya market and casualty tolls were increasing every other minute—25, then 40, then 75…an hour later news was talking bout more than a hundred killed in what the media like to call a "predominantly Shia neighborhood" Al-Sadriya (the place the bomb went off) doesn't belong to a certain sect; it's a commercial area where shoppers and shopkeepers are simply Baghdadis but sadly the media is keen on adding sectarian descriptions of the attacked targets in their reports. "
And then there is this by Iranian journalist Amer Taheri in the NY Post:
"The truth, however, is that, although there is a great deal of killing in Iraq, there is no civil war in any reasonable sense of that term.
"Sectarian war" is also hard to sustain. Although there is killing prompted by sectarian hatred, what we have today is a war of the sectarians, not a sectarian war. The difference is not mere semantics.
In a sectarian war, the overwhelming majorities of rival religious sects subscribe to the aims of their own side and actively participate in their pursuit. I saw this in the '90s, when I covered the various wars in the former Yugoslavia....Nothing of the sort exists in Iraq today. The deadly disease of sectarianism has not contaminated the majority of Iraqis."
As I said, that it's a mess is undeniable. But I've always felt that things, eventually, will be more or less all right. And I'm doing the only thing I know how to do to help.
No comments:
Post a Comment