Lent is more than a diet; it's a spiritual journey. Joseph Yoo shares how fasting reveals our hunger and dependence on God. Dive into silence and prayer, and discover what your Lenten practice has to teach you.
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This episode is an audio essay from Rev. Joseph Yoo. Joseph Yoo is the author When the Saints Go Flying in. He is a West Coaster at heart contently living in Houston, Texas with his wife and son. He serves at Mosaic Church in Houston. Find more of his writing at josephyoo.com.
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This episode posted on March 19, 2025
Episode Transcript:
Ryan Dunn:
This is Compass finding spirituality in the everyday. I'm Ryan Dunn. Here's a fun fact. Episodes about the Christian season of Lent are consistently among our most listened to episodes. I I don't get it either. I guess people are just hungering for something spiritual in this season, you know, while they hunger for other things because they're they're fasting, you see. Anyways, since you you and your friends seem to hunger for more Lent, this episode delivers some of that. Unfortunately, some personal circumstances have kept me from doing a ton of research myself.
Ryan Dunn:
My family is mourning the loss of my father after a prolonged illness while I prepare this episode. So I'm gonna lean on to the words of my friend, Reverend Joseph Yoo, for this particular episode. Joseph has been a guest on Compass previously, and he wrote dozens of articles for our old Rethink Church website. One article addressed a few questions about Lent. Specifically, why give up things for Lent? Or, you know, why do we fast for Lent? And what makes a a good Lenten practice? So we're diving into that. It's an audio essay for Lent by Joseph Yoo here on this episode of the Compass Podcast.
Joseph Yoo:
I'm giving up being nice to my siblings for Lent, a youth student declared emphatically. Well, if she can give up being nice, I'm going to give up doing homework, another chimed in. Oh, I'm gonna tell my parents that I'm giving up chores for Lent because the church said it's a good thing to do. And that's when I knew that I had incredibly messed up. For years, we talked about giving things up for the Lenten season, but I realized I never really talked about the why of the seasonal fasting. At best, it was treated like a short diet plan. No chocolate, or no soda, or no coffee. And at worst, and this moment with my youth kids was as bad as it could get, fasting became a scapegoat to not do things you should be doing.
Joseph Yoo:
One of the reasons why we give things up for Lent is to sit with our hunger. For the majority of us reading this, we often don't allow ourselves to sit with our hunger. We don't need to. In fact, we complain when our hunger isn't satiated in a timely manner. Everything is seemingly readily and quickly accessible, and the hunger I talk about goes beyond just food. We get annoyed when there is a slight lag in the videos we're watching on our phone. Amazon's Prime two day delivery sometimes doesn't seem quick enough. We get a little agitated when we mobile order our Starbucks while five minutes out and it's still not ready when we arrive to pick it up.
Joseph Yoo:
So the Lent season offers us an opportunity to sit with our hungers. We give something up to learn what the hunger reveals about us. What is the hunger beneath the hunger? And who or what or where is God when I am hungry for something I desire? Is it God the creator that will sate this hunger? Or is it money, fame and popularity, relationships? What is your hunger teaching you about yourself and your dependence on God? And here are some Lenten practices I have engaged in throughout my life that help reveal things about myself and God. Silence. This Lent, I set aside fifteen minutes of being in silence daily. It's really easy for me to be silent, a side effect of being an introvert. However, not having any intentional noise around me has been a lot more difficult than I anticipated. I often would spend the first fifteen minutes of a walk without music in my ears and without talking.
Joseph Yoo:
After a few minutes, I felt the urge to talk to myself out loud just to add some other noise around me. Why is it so difficult to be in silence? So far, the biggest thing this short period of intentional silence has taught me is to be aware of God's presence. Sometimes I focus on so much of my output that I may miss the input from God. Being still and silent helps me to edge closer to hear the still small voice of God. Fasting. Sometimes I have fasted for meals, other times certain medias. There are times where I have a stain from particular foods, like coffee. This was the easiest to discern what the fast was teaching me.
Joseph Yoo:
Christians don't live on bread alone. Fill in whatever your context is for bread. During the season I gave up coffee and that caffeine headache came roaring in, it really made me question if I was more dependent on coffee or on prayer. Why can't it be both? The physical hunger pangs made it easier to be reminded that ultimately my dependence is in God, that I'm made whole only in and through God. Prayer. Most Lenten seasons I like adding a discipline rather than taking something away from my life or plate. Some seasons I add intentional times of prayer. It's similar to taking time for silence, but noise is involved.
Joseph Yoo:
Instead of scrolling mindlessly through social media or watching something on TV like I normally would do in that time and space, I turned it towards prayer. This intentional time of prayer reminded me that I don't need to be entertained every waking moment of my life. It helped me recenter myself and be reminded of what actually are the priorities of my life. But most importantly, it taught me that I am not God. God is God. Intentional and Random Acts of Kindness. Last year, I set out to bless someone, anyone, every day. Michael Frost in Surprise the World described blessing someone as adding strength to one's arm.
Joseph Yoo:
This means leaving someone slightly better than when we first encountered them, helping them to breathe just a little bit better. So I decided to be a small blessing in people's day. Take a friend out to lunch, pay for a stranger's coffee, put my neighbor's trash bins back after the trash was collected, send encouraging and affirming letters, anything and everything. It was a practice of inviting Mother Teresa's quote, do small things with great love. I mean, what is one of the surest ways to show my love for God? To love my neighbor. The biggest takeaway from that season was I can always afford to be generous. So what are some of the revelations you are discovering in your Lenten disciplines this year?
Ryan Dunn:
It's Ryan again. We'll be back to our normal schedule in two weeks time. In the meantime, you can feast upon more episodes of compass and get show notes and all that at umc.org/compass. Thanks for taking this break with me. I appreciate it. And I'm looking forward to getting back with you soon. Peace.
