As an enneagram type one, a recovering perfectionist, it is both my strength and downfall to want to fix everything — most of all myself. Catherine Marshall’s piece Fasting from Criticalness hit my heart like an arrow. For one day she chose not to criticize anyone about anything. This was the fruit:

Ideas began to flow in a way I had not experienced in years. Now it was apparent what the Lord wanted me to see. My critical nature had not corrected a single one of the multitudinous things I found fault with. What it had done was to stifle my own creativity — in prayer, in relationships, perhaps even in writing — ideas that He wanted to give me.

Do you see what God wants to bestow on us if we’d only give him the room to do so? He withholds no good thing from us, but sometimes our lives are too full to receive it. Fasting is a way to make room.

Can you imagine a college student giving up all media — phone, internet, music, movies — for several weeks? Chris Hall shares from his Eastern University days how his students took up that challenge. And lest we mistake fasting for ​“giving stuff up for God,” listen to Mimi Dixon reframe it as a way to ​“rest with God with expectancy.”