My Fasting Experience - Longing to Eat What Fell From the Rich Man's Table

On the eighteenth day of my twenty-one day fast, I served as a WatchDOG at Olivia's school. This wonderful program invites dads to serve for a day at their child's school. We help car riders unload and get into school.  We push swings at recess.  We review flash cards with students who are struggling.  We open six to seven hundred milk cartons, yogurt containers and Lunchables lids.  It is a great program!  It also gives dads a new appreciation for teachers! I usually enjoy my days at the school serving as WatchDOG.  However, when I signed up in January for a Wednesday in April, I didn't know I would be fasting, living life at 50-75% speed.  The kindergarteners on the playground didn't expect that either.

Recess was a bit rough, but I made it.  Two hours of lunchroom help, however, did me in.  At the end of lunch, with a few hours left in the school day, I had to give in and go home.  I just couldn't do it.

But that is not the purpose of this post.  The cafeteria crisis was deeper.  I have written earlier that after even one day of fasting, the hunger pains go away.  If you have experimented with fasting, you really must try a multi-day fast sometime. It is not has tortuous as you have imagined - the hunger pains really do go away!  But by day 18, having lost more than twenty pounds, I was getting hungry.  And desire for food increased in the presence of it!  The hot lunch options for the day included a hot dog or roasted chicken.  You can imagine which option most of the kids selected.  It was so hard to open container after container.  I just wanted a bite.  Near the end of each class's lunchtime, the students walk to the end of the table and dump their styrofoam trays, sporks and uneaten leftovers. I found myself longing for a leftover.  Gross, I know, but hey, I was hungry and there was food!

No, this is not a post on how Americans waste too much food, or a critique of school lunch programs.  If you want that, write your own blog post on the topic.

Here is the takeaway from my lunchroom longings:  I wondered how many hungry children in developing nations or in overcrowded cities walk past electronics stores and stare at televisions in the windows showing first world citizens eating cheeseburgers, hot dogs, cake and specialty coffees. As   gaze at life in a distant world, do they long for just a bite of food, of any food, but get no nourishment, neither from their own family or government, or from the families they see feasting around the world?  Do they, like the beggar Lazarus who lived outside the gates of the unnamed rich man, long to eat even the scraps that fall from our tables?  That story in Luke 16 scares me.  You see, I am a one-percenter, globally speaking.  And most likely so are you.  So are all of the campers who "occupied" Wall Street a few summers ago. 

When I am not fasting, I am feasting, and most likely so are you.  If "overeating" is the consumption of more calories than are needed to maintain healthy BMI, then I am guilty.  How can I regularly feast/overeat in good conscience while others are starving?  The parable of the rich man and Lazarus scares me.  Just sayin...

A second image raced through my mind as I stood in the cafeteria watching fifty gallon trash liners fill with leftovers and utensils.  I wonder how much of our processed food is packaged in foreign companies by underage workers earning pennies an hour, working seven days a week from dawn till dusk, sharing what they earn with their families but remaining hungry?  I have no research, so the answer might be zero.  But it might be in the thousands, too.  And as they watch my future snack food fall into one hundred calorie packages, and as they load trucks headed for my grocery store, do they long to sneak a bite to fill their stomachs, but stop short because they know the dreadful consequences?

I hesitated to write this for three weeks because I wanted to present viable solutions.   I wish I had answers. To say, "just give more money to the poor," is an easy, vague cop-out.  We all tried once to take up our mom's threat to send our vegetables to starving kids in China, but she never did ship that box, did she?  But somehow we must connect our personal eating habits to giving, to make it real, and more than a mere impersonal monetary donation.  I did have the idea that maybe whenever we eat out we should commit to giving a donation equal to the amount of our bill to a ministry that is feeding the starving.

Do you have ideas?  How can we truly share our food with those who are hungry and have no means to obtain it themselves?