Perfect Monday

My church are beginning a 40 day media fast on Monday and I'm concerned.

To explain, the church are instigating a fast from all secular media for 40 days from this Monday, meaning no TV, DVDs, newspapers, magazines or, controversially, video games. Controversial because a friend of mine was actually heckled during our service on Sunday for asking, mid-sermon, whether Playstation games were included in the fast. I wasn't there, but I'm told he was actually booed from a large section of the congregation, something I've NEVER heard of before. Quite an accomplishment. His reasoning was thus; where do you draw the line between playing scrabble and playing Tiger Woods 2006? And you can see his point, but let's not get into that.

The reason for the fast is simple - to sanctify the church. For every minute reading Hello, watching Desperate Housewives or listening to Pussycat Dolls, we could be doing something to edify our spirits and bring us closer to God. Like another good and wise friend of mine said recently, it's the dog you feed that wins the fight. He also said something about a hill and a frog, but I didn't understand.

My very first thought when the fast was announced was, 'great, now I can pray more', until about half a second later, when I realised that 40 days is a long time and I still had about 36 episodes of 24 to watch if I was to finish Bruce's box set before Monday. 40 days without CTU Agent Jack Bauer and President David Palmer? Not sure about that. Then, I thought, what will I do when I'm eating my tea? If I can't watch the telly I'll have to listen to music, but there are only about four Christian songs I actually like, so that'll wear thin pretty quickly. Then...My PSP! Burnout Legends wasn't made by Christians, was it? Probably not. What on earth am I going to do with myself?

And that wasn't it. I actually study media, I realised. I'll have to get a note from the pastors to get me out of assignments or something, because how can I write an essay on gender stereotypes in American sitcoms if I can't watch them?

Which brings me to my point, that it's a heart issue, and my heart's probably in the wrong place most of the time. It's impossible for many people, including me, to avoid all secular media completely, but the fast is still absolutely feasible and will be massively beneficial. The purpose of it is not to switch off from the world entirely just to look different to everyone else, but to fill myself with good things - things from God - with my time. If I'm honest with myself, and now you, I've spent more time watching 24 over the last month than I have praying, much more, and that can't be good at all.

For that reason alone this fast will be one of the best things that's ever happened to me. I love having stuff like this to focus me, like when I ate one too many steak bakes and decided I needed to to lose six stone. I had a dream and I worked out a plan (running up muddy hills and eating flavourless green stuff, as it turned out) so I could accomplish it. This is the same, except there'll be a few hundred other people doing it with me and the goal's much better. I can only imagine what it'll be like after 40 days if I stick to this and feed my spirit with only good stuff.

I'm the type of person who needs everything to have a definite start point. It's actually a bit weird, and quite hard to explain, but I tend to build things up into mini dramas in my mind. Sort of like people who always stuff themselves with cakes over the weekend so they can start their diet on Monday, rather than starting right away and just doing it. I'm always looking for that perfect Monday, the day when I wake up completely changed and begin to be the me I've always wanted to be - best husband / drummer / writer / dancer / whatever. The problem is, it never really happens that way, and when it does I find I've waited for months for it to arrive, for no real reason. That's why it took me a year of talking about it before I actually gave up smoking, and the same for losing weight.

Ironically, in an Alanis Morissette sort of way, this fast is offering me an easy 'perfect Monday,' yet at the same time an end to that way of thinking. I really believe that loads of Christians, and non-Christians for that matter, are kept down and ineffective by this thought pattern. It's very stupid, but very hard to get out of, and the only way it can be overcome is by giving it to God like everything else. What I'm saying is that this fast starts on Monday, and no matter what my frame of mind is I'm starting it that day with everyone else, providing me with an amazing opportunity to give everything I have to God and come closer to him than ever before, which will change me completely. This will end my old way of thinking.

It's interesting, and entirely unsurprising, that the more time I spend with the Holy Spirit, the more sensitive I become to things I've thought normal for ages. It freaks me out a bit, but there are some things that are intrinsically part of who I am that I'm becoming quite uncomfortable with. A recent and seemingly trivial example is Friends, which for years has been my favourite TV programme. My wife and I have most of the 200 odd episodes on DVD and, sadly, I know most of them line-for-line from being a student with too much time on my hands, then later 'working' from home. However, it recently dawned on me that this is a programme about six blasphemous twentysomethings whose lives basically revolve around finding people to sleep with. The problem is that it paints this type of life as completely normal, admirable and moral, and it's actually very, very funny, so I can excuse it. This is freaky for me, because I find myself on a moral high-horse about a show that 99 percent of non-Christians (and maybe even some Christians) would find perfectly normal. Maybe some people will find my views a little hysterical, and I've never thought of myself as like that at all. The thing is, I was watching Friends today, so what does that tell you?

I need this fast.

What scares me and excites me in equal measure is that there'll be a load of things that I do, think and say that I currently have no idea are not right, but being closer to God will highlight them and make me do something about it. In all this, I'm aware that I sound like all God wants from me is to take the things that I enjoy away, but that couldn't be further from the truth. Everything that God highlights to me as a problem, he does so for my benefit, to replace those things with blessings. Being in close fellowship with God is what I was made for, so cutting out things that get in the way of that and replacing them with Godly things will allow God to reveal his perfect (there's that word again) plan for me. I've seen this over and over again. Everything I do within the will of God for my life gives me real joy, not just pleasure, but purposeful joy.

It's like the difference between performing in a band and playing for God, or worshipping. It was only when I properly understood that my playing was from God and should always be an offering to God that I experienced real joy through it, rather than just enjoying it for the purpose of adulation or whatever. As you can probably tell, music has always been a big deal in my life and I'm really grateful to God for keeping me close to him through it and giving me the opportunities I've had so far, as inconsequential as they may seem in the grand scheme of things.

I will rarely get as good a chance as this fast to get as close to God as I've always wanted to be. Let's see what happens...