When I was still living in Dublin I spent the last three years living in an area formerly known as Little Jerusalem, due to the once-thriving Jewish community who lived in the neighborhood. There are some rare Hebrew-origin streets names there which hint at this. I lived on a street called Reuben Avenue, and a stone’s throw away from my house was a Place called Rehoboth, which comes from Genesis 26:22, wherein Isaac finally finds a place to settle with his flocks and his family. Rehoboth essentially means “wide open spaces,” like that 90’s song from The Chicks!

He moved from there and dug another well, and they did not quarrel over it; so he called it Rehoboth, saying, “Now the Lord has made room for us, and we shall be fruitful in the land.” Gen. 26:22

On the end of Rehoboth Place, there stands an enormous house that looks like it was built to be a multi-family dwelling. Rather, it was for one family in the 18th century who had twenty four (!!) children. They chose a place to live, then outside the city walls, where there were some good spring-fed wells, and they could have enough space for all their children; thus the name, and the large building.

Both this Irish family, and the family of Isaac, had to find a defined and definite place to settle down, in order to flourish. What is the connection between my exploration of weakness through fasting, and flourishing? I believe that it is to be found along our boundary lines.

Boundary Lines

A year ago I wrote about fasting and I made a claim that it should generate compassion through a recognition of our own weaknesses. “What fasting does is simultaneously heighten the threshold for personal suffering, and deepen a sense of compassion because of that suffering.” I have recently realized that I never backed up that claim, which is unscientific of me. Today I want to explore this claim a little bit, drawing from pastoral metaphors of boundary lines and wide open spaces.

The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup; you hold my lot. The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; I have a goodly heritage. Ps. 16:5-6

As we know from the first chapters of Genesis, each of us is like a cracked mirror–broken, weakened, flawed. Each of us has a lack, in one form or another. We each carry spiritual and therefore physical impoverishment, and to deny this about ourselves and the world would actually be an expression of that fallen state. Our brokenness should lead us back to God, without whom we cannot flourish. However, we are also finite beings, with other, normal–or even healthy–weaknesses, which delineate who we are and our abilities.

One of my now-favorite bible scholars I actually came across during the first lockdown while I was unemployed, and I reached out to him mid-2020 to thank him for how much his research had re-energized me as a scholar. (Ultimately our conversations and his guidance is what in fact led me to Germany this summer!) In my first email, I mentioned I was interested in researching fasting in the Hebrew Bible, and he responded that the isolation and low activity of the pandemic felt like a kind of fasting to him.

Although it was not technically fasting per se, many of us had the time to step away from our normal lives and to deeply examine our souls, to remind ourselves of what we truly value. We also faced our greatest fears around mortality and health, financial instability, and isolation. It was a painful denial of the goodness of social interaction for the greater good of others’ physical health and safety, as well as our own. It was a kind of vow of poverty which we all had to take.

Hangriness & Bad Habits

In one of my first posts about fasting, back in 2018, I talk about how fasting makes us hangry, in more ways than one: “There’s a deeper kind of agitated hunger that we uncover through fasting.” In my initial days cultivating this discipline, I used the physical hunger pangs I was feeling to redirect my mind toward my goal of uninterrupted time with Jesus, solely focused on Him and His Word. I became more able to tolerate the alarm signals in my body, and to train my being to understand that while I would be breaking my fast that evening, there was a greater good I was in pursuit of. This resulted, eventually, in control over my constant sugar cravings, among other transformations.

Initially I just saw this as a wonderful ascetic practice that was intended to bring about greater self-discipline and therefore Christlikeness. However, when I first began fasting, it was late 2016 and I had, for the second time, moved back from Dublin to live with my parents. I was 26 years old, living in a town where I had no friends, and the place just made me feel trapped, lifeless, and at times, hopeless that I would ever find my way back to Dublin to live there more permanently. So it makes sense that a sugar buzz temporarily dampened the depressed feeling I was living with. However, some of that hopelessness also stemmed from my fear that God would forget about me, and that He would not provide for me to return to Ireland. A spiritual wound, a sin-flaw, not to trust fully in God, and to take my own emotions as the truth.

Central here is that we often, or always, fail to see that “bad habits” are always somehow connected, especially our bodily habits, to deeper pain. If we don’t acknowledge the root cause, our spiritual impoverishment, then we will never be rid of the symptomatic bad habits that either niggle at or hound us daily. God wants deeper and deeper healing for us, but we have to have the bravery to choose it.

Boundary Lines

Let us return to the classic pastoral metaphor that I began with in Psalms. Each of us is allotted a wide open space, a pleasant and fertile land which is our lives, and it is our God-given responsibility, like Adam, or Isaac, to cultivate, nurture, and protect that land. If I am the landlady of my own life, and my silly sheep keep escaping through a broken fence in their pen, I must do the hard work of rebuilding that fence, ultimately to protect my livelihood. Then when the foxes come prowling around my perimeter at night, my sheep will no longer keep becoming someone else’s dinner.

How does this generate compassion, then, as I am claiming? Perhaps I know a younger or more inexperienced landowner who has broken fences that need mending, and they think buying border collie puppies will solve the problem, but it just doesn’t work. I could show my neighbor instead how to repair their fence. Or maybe I own a portion of forested land, and I can share timber for fencing, because my neighbor is poorer than I, and they are in need of wood. Awareness of our flaws should make us more compassionate toward the flaws we see in others, rather than antagonistic and full of blame and anger. I am no better than anyone else.

Put plainly, the goal of asceticism is to bear the fruit of righteousness, but that righteousness is not only of value in and of itself; it must be of benefit to others. This means mending fences, shoring up our weak places, and learning to flourish within our rehoboth.

Dwelling in Rehoboth

A further example from my time in Dublin: I initially thought that I loved youth ministry, but after seeing how exhausted and sick I became after one week of youth camp (two summers in a row!) once I returned to Dublin for my master’s, I stepped away from youth ministry to focus on young adult ministry, and especially, my studies. This is another kind of human weakness–a weakness at our limits, which actually indicates where our strength is. It makes sense that I would be plagued by awful sinus infection for a week or more after Pulse camp, because my body was constantly in fight-or-flight mode from overstimulation, lack of sleep, and physically pushing myself.

Our limits delineate who we are, which is why it is so important to know and fight for our boundaries. I am not responsible for guarding someone else’s cabbage patch; or if I try to pull slugs off someone’s tomatoes all day, then the rabbits will nibble away all my radishes, and my overgrown zucchini will choke out the onions, and all my ripe plums will fall to the ground, wasted.

How are my physical and mental limits also tied to my flawed sin nature? I can see now that my adrenaline-fueled time in youth ministry was actually driven by a wrong idea that I had to change my personality in order to fit in (and avoid rejection) as well as a sense of obligation to “perform” like a good missionary. That stemmed from my own previous wounds, insecurities, and dysfunctional ways of viewing the world. I didn’t respect my own limits, which is a sure path to burnout and spiritual barrenness. Once I started to respect those limits while doing my master’s, then I began to produce fruit that has led me to begin dreaming of a career as an academic and scholar.

Self-Compassion is Compassion

The cultivated pain and discipline of fasting (focused time in prayer and Bible-reading) clears our vision and gives perspective into our souls, illuminating the places where we need His healing. The time we spend reading the Bible, rather than eating, nourishes us with divine wisdom to then understand the shortcoming of others, and more broadly, the systemic dysfunction in our world. To willingly create a limit (i.e., I will fast once a week) can be perceived as weakness in a productivity-driven society. But it is within those boundary lines, on our fertile inner fields, that we can begin to flourish. That is God’s gift to us!

My responsibility–indeed, my calling– is to give that gift back to Him, through loving my neighbor as myself. If I am flourishing, then I can better serve others and find ways to help them flourish uniquely. I want to give out of a plentiful harvest. This includes the joyful responsibility of respecting my own limits and cherishing my unique strengths, but also the continued task of healing and ever-increasing in Christlike character and love. This, friends, is how we stay in pursuit of the shalom of the Kingdom, bringing heaven down to earth.