Why I'm Grateful For Fasting

In Elder Holland’s recent talk about helping those in need, he said this, “Like you, I have had to worry about finances on occasion, but I have never been poor, nor do I even know how the poor feel. Furthermore, I do not know all the reasons why the circumstances of birth, health, education, and economic opportunities vary so widely here in mortality.”  I can certainly say the same thing—I know enough about poverty in the world to know that I have never known poverty.  This is one of the reasons that I am grateful for the commandment to fast every month.  I can’t say that I enjoy fasting, but I do get to learn something by experience that I would not know otherwise: for a small moment I get to know what it’s like to be hungrier than I want to be, to yearn for water and yet not be able to drink it, to feel an empty stomach and not immediately fill it.  Of course it’s only for a very small time period and does not represent the extended length of suffering that many face, but it at least gives me a reminder of what great blessings I have.    

I know that there are many spiritual blessings that can come from fasting—I have seen prayers answered because of it and solutions to difficult problems found.  From Isaiah, though, we learn that there is another purpose of the fast: “to deal thy bread to the hungry” and “bring the poor that are cast out to thy house” (Isaiah 58:7).  This is accomplished by the fact that we have more resources to give when we skip a meal, but more important I believe is the empathy that fasting can give us.  If we do it right we will gain at least a small understanding of what it is like to not have enough.  If we let it, our skipping meals by choice can help us develop feelings of gratitude and a desire to help those who skip meals because they have no other choice. 

             From the angel’s words to King Benjamin we learn that Christ would “suffer temptations, and pain of body, hunger, thirst, and fatigue, even more than man can suffer, except it be unto death” (Mosiah 3:7).  Surely the reference here is at least in part to the forty days of fasting that the Savior experienced.  If I interpret King Benjamin’s words correctly, then we learn that the Savior’s hunger and thirst were so intense that they would have killed a mortal man.  His need for food and water were past the point of death, and yet He endured it and had forty times the hunger and thirst that we experience when we fast for a day.  Surely this experience for the Savior was part of His descending below all things so He could empathize with all kinds of human pain, and our own fasting experience can likewise help us in a small way develop that kind of love He has for the sufferer (see D&C 122:8).