Slowing Down

01 · The fast

Ten days, three weeks, and one familiar Bible story.

In the Bible, Daniel 1 tells how Daniel and his companions asked for a ten-day test: vegetables and water instead of the Babylonian king's food and wine. Later, Daniel 10 describes three weeks without choice food, meat, or wine. The modern Daniel Fast I encountered brought those passages together as a temporary exercise in discipline.

At my church, joining the fast was generally voluntary and periodic—maybe once a year—not something everyone was constantly doing in unison. But voluntary didn't mean pressure-free. We understood Daniel as someone willing to be set apart and live differently, and we liked to imagine ourselves that way too. Even his Hebrew name means “God is my judge.”

The ten-day test appears in Daniel 1:8–16. The three-week period appears in Daniel 10:2–3.

02 · The contrast

Then we went back to normal.

These scenes weren't all part of the same fast. They were the ordinary backdrop around it. At a youth event in the church's Family Life Center, we might eat pizza and Warheads, drink Mountain Dew, and play Halo until four in the morning.

On ordinary Sunday nights as teenagers, we might go from the church service to Applebee's for a table full of fried appetizers and bottomless cherry Coke—and then go to school in the morning.

While we self-identified as set apart, our everyday eating looked completely at home in the surrounding culture. The fast was something to endure before returning to normal.

03 · The defaults

Normal had already been chosen for me.

For me, the standard American diet—the S.A.D., an acronym almost too perfect—looked like Coke, Little Caesars, Snickers, frozen dinners, fast food, and extra-large everything. They were ordinary parts of growing up. They were simply the defaults around me.

Adults become responsible for feeding ourselves, but adults are also, in some ways, big kids with grocery money. If you're never taught to question your defaults, they can feel less like choices and more like fixed positions.

04 · Learning together

My family was changing, too.

Around that time, my brother Nathan was dealing with a cluster of health issues. He had to become exact about eliminating what was not working for his body, and he became our resident expert on all kinds of things.

He introduced our family to foods and ideas we had never considered—including kombucha, which is still one of my favorite things to drink.

It was not a declaration that one person had all the right answers. It was a family becoming more open to doing things differently and treating our bodies and minds with greater care.

05 · The boundary

When I turned twenty-one, I became vegetarian.

There were several reasons:

• EthicsI was thinking more seriously about animal cruelty in the food industry.
• TasteI'd never especially liked the taste of meat.
• HabitI was beginning to understand how much eating happens automatically.

If meat was no longer an option, I couldn't thoughtlessly stop at Wendy's for a Chicken Bacon Ranch sandwich, a large fry and large Coke, maybe even a Frosty. I had to pause. I had to decide what I was actually going to eat.

06 · Attention

Enjoyment has a history.

Our enjoyment of food doesn't develop in a vacuum. Long before most of us have nutritional knowledge or much critical distance, we learn what food means through habit, convenience, repetition, family, celebration, and reward. We're given a picture of indulgence before we're old enough to ask whether it's making us feel good.

Becoming vegetarian didn't instantly make me healthy, and it didn't make every meal intentional. It gave me one meaningful boundary in an area of life that can otherwise run almost entirely on impulse.

07 · The practice

Something larger grew inside that boundary.

Eating became more than avoiding meat or proving how long I could go without pepperoni pizza. It became a practice of paying attention: to what I put into my body, to where food comes from, to how it makes me feel, and to the people with whom I share it.

Food is fuel, but it's never only fuel. It can be a ritual, a creative process, an expression of care, and something made genuinely my own.