More Fasting Reflections

After my pre-dawn breakfast, I read a most beautiful prayer by Bahá'u'lláh on fasting. A few lines, in particular, struck me.

"Thou has endowed every hour of these days with a special virtue, inscrutable to all except Thee, Whose knowledge embraceth all created things."
How incredible to think that there might be something particularly powerful about these days of fasting, that each hour has been endowed with a special virtue. I suspect all who are fasting want these days to be a special period of more intense spiritual growth. I certainly desire that for myself and feel humbled by the fact that I am not fully tapping into the potency of this period every hour. I have yet to learn what it would even mean to do so, and perhaps I will not gain that realization this year, but I hope that over a lifetime of fasting it may become clearer.

Having woken sleepy today, this line made me smile: "These are they who have been so inebriated with the wine of Thy manifold wisdom that they forsake their couches in their longing to celebrate Thy praise and extol Thy virtues, and flee from sleep in their eagerness to approach Thy presence and partake of Thy bounty."