A fast for others
How a child's question is shaping my Lenten fasts
The following essay is the final reflection for our March focus on the spiritual practice of Fasting. Read more here about our exploration of the spiritual disciplines in 2025 through creative and reflective writing.
By Diana Gruver
My children’s biggest questions usually come in the car.
One recent morning, as we were driving the winding, field-flanked road to my childhood home, I heard my son’s soft voice from the backseat. “Mommy, what does it mean to lay our lives down?”
My mind had wandered, and it took me a moment to find a context for his question. We’d been listening to some of our favorite car music that morning, which adapts Scripture to song, and had come to the track based on 1 John 3:16: “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters” (NIV).
I found myself in the beautiful tension that comes when answering important, hefty questions for a child. There is no space for abstractions or cliché. Only for the honest, concrete simplicity that connects with the mind and heart of (in this case) a three-year-old.
So, we talked about what it looks like to give up or put aside things we might like or could have to help someone else or make them feel loved and special. The application moment came only minutes later as he wrestled through sharing a sandwich cracker with his younger sister.
This little conversation has been on my mind as we’ve entered the season of Lent this year. Many of us have selected something to “give up” or fast from. This fast can reflect our repentance over a sin or an idol that holds a place in our heart. It can cut our dependence on things and remind us of our dependence on God alone. It can bring to mind the sufferings of Christ, as we recall all He laid down for us and for our salvation.
It is easy to be lured into a place where this fast primarily focuses on our spiritual development and personal holiness. Though we’d never be so crass, our Lenten fasts can subtly become a spiritual improvement program or an effort to “get closer to God” for forty days. Or, for those of us with my temperament, it can become another box to check, another quiet way to prove we’re good enough.
But these traps assume our spiritual life and growth can somehow exist in a vacuum, and when we fall into them, we miss something important. Something cruciform.
Jesus’ spiritual life—His fasting, His prayer, etc.—wasn’t only for his own “spiritual health.” He sacrificed; He gave so that we could receive. His entire being was for the sake of others. And as we mirror Him as His disciples, our lives should follow the same pattern.
The Apostle Paul famously wrote in 1 Corinthians 13, “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing” (1 Cor. 13:1-3).
Perhaps it would be fitting to add to this list, “If I fast for Lent, but have not love, I gain nothing.” Paul reminds us: if our spiritual endeavors do not grow the fruit of practical love, they are for naught. The spiritual life should be pushing us ever further into loving God and loving our neighbor. It is not an isolated, solely private endeavor. It is the compass that guides our every movement, the engine that drives the way we engage with the world.
Perhaps my son’s question is one we should invite into our Lenten fasts: What does it mean to lay our lives down? What does it mean to relinquish, deny, set aside, and deprive our desires or passions to serve and benefit another? What would it look like to fast for the sake of others?
I can’t help but think of God’s words in Isaiah 58:6-7: “Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—when you see the naked, to clothe them, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?”
What would this look like for you, friend? What would embracing this active, others-focused, social dimension of our spiritual lives during this Lenten season look like?
It does not need to be complicated. You could fast from going out to eat or your morning Starbucks and give that money to feeding the hungry. You could fast from all beverages but water and dedicate the money you would have spent on other drinks to a program providing clean water in developing communities. You could give up social media, television, or online gaming and dedicate that time to helping at a local homeless shelter or addiction recovery center, visiting shut-ins and the sick, or volunteering with a refugee resettlement agency.
John Chrysostom (349-407), an early church father, said: "No act of virtue can be great if it is not followed by advantage for others. So, no matter how much time you spend fasting, no matter how much you sleep on a hard floor and eat ashes and sigh continually, if you do no good to others, you do nothing great."
As we take focused time over these next few weeks to meditate on Christ and see His example, may we consider how to lay down our lives in love for others. May His love compel us to love not only in words (or in the quietness of our prayer closets) but “with actions and in truth” (1 John 3:18).
Diana Gruver writes about discipleship and spiritual formation in the every day. She is the author of Companions in the Darkness: Seven Saints who Struggled with Depression and Doubt. You can often find her singing in her Pennsylvania kitchen with her husband and ever-curious children. Find more of her work at www.dianagruver.com, follow her on Substack, connect with her on Facebook and Instagram.
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Such valuable things to consider--it's not enough to "leave behind," but we must also "press toward"! Thank you for sharing!
Thanks for the valuable advice! Kids have a way of cutting through the polite “fluff” and encouraging us to consider how to follow up our fasting with adding something helpful…it’s the inverse of “saying yes to something means saying no to something else”!