Zechariah 7:1-7. The people of Bethel are asking their priests if they still have to mourn and fast in the fifth and seventh months, as they have been doing for seventy years, at God's direction. God tells Zachariah to tell them "When you fasted and mourned in the fifth month and in the seventh, for these seventy years, was it for me that you fasted? And when you eat and when you drink, do you not eat for yourselves and drink for yourselves?" He reminds them that the fasting requirement came to be at a time when Jerusalem and her cities were all inhabited and in prosperity, it was a time of plenty.

God is reminding us here to keep his commands - they are for our good, not his. (Although this is about fasting, the lesson really applies to all of his rules.)  God created us so that we need to eat and drink to stay alive. He made that a pleasurable experience, because he loves us and wants us to feel happiness in the things we have to do. But, since the Fall, he does not want us to get too attached to this world and its pleasures. Fasting in one way to train ourselves out of attachment.

When we eat and drink we get pleasure for ourselves, not for God. So then when we fast, we are getting something for ourselves, as well, we are not giving something to God. We so dislike and avoid discomfort, but it is good for us to take it on sometimes. Fasting actually does a lot for us. At the most basic level, it gets us ready for times when discomfort, or worse, will be necessary - when those things come without our asking. When we learn to do without in times of plenty, we are ready when we must do without.

Fasting also teaches us to appreciate what we have when we get it back. Going all of Lent without wine certainly made me appreciate a glass of wine on Easter Sunday! Sometimes, though, when we get back to the thing that we are fasting from, we realize that we don't really need it, or want it, and this can be a good that comes out of fasting as well - a detachment from certain things that we thought were important, but we find really are not.

We've spent over a year "fasting" in many ways while under COVID-19 restrictions. Now that we are starting to get back to those things, I, for one, am going to try to put them in perspective and not attach too much importance to them. The "fasting" has taught me I had somewhat disordered attachments to many things.