The Holy Hunger

There are books written about fasting by people who love the Bible but fear the body, and books written by people who understand the body but have lost the altar. The Holy Hunger is the bridge between them.

Most believers come to fasting carrying a question they have never learned how to ask. They sense that something has gone slack, that prayers have begun to feel like talking into a closed room, that the appetites which once served them now quietly run the household. They have heard that fasting might help. And then they open a book that is either all devotion and no instruction, or all science and no God, and they close it none the wiser.

This book was written for that person. It takes the spirit of fasting with complete seriousness, because that is the whole point. And it takes the body seriously too, explaining in plain and accurate language exactly what happens inside you when you fast, hour by hour and day by day, so that the experience holds no terror and few surprises. It clears away the myths that have left so many sincere people frightened, confused, or quietly defeated by their third day.

Across four movements, The Holy Hunger asks why we hunger at all, shows what the Bible actually teaches about the fast, surveys the many kinds of fasting from the absolute to the partial to the fast from screens and noise our distracted age has made newly necessary, and then becomes a companion you carry into the fast itself across forty days of daily readings, each with a scripture, a meditation, and a focus for prayer.

You do not have to fast forty days to use it. Take the readings at whatever pace your fast requires. Whether you are fasting for the first time or returning to a discipline you have kept for years, this book will walk beside you, from the difficult valley of the early days into the cleared and quiet country where God has always met those who grow hungry for Him on purpose.

Stay hungry for Him, and you will never finally go without.