Dear Blog Reading Friends,
I created this blog a couple of years ago. I just finished reading the posts, and decided to scrap them and start over again.
I kept seeing a pattern in my blog posts of starting something then quitting. This is a bad habit from childhood that I THOUGHT I had totally overcome in 2007, but it seemed to resurface in 2009 after a bought with illness, loss of our small business, life changes and the return of depression.
Since those blogs we have moved, recovered almost completely from our losses, I went to school to study web design, got a job, left a job and now am again, at least for a short while, a homemaker again.
I recently found a devotional that is really helping me pinpoint a trigger I didn't realize existed in my life. The trigger is feeling like I've falling short. If I feel unwholesome, unworthy or unwanted I revert back into a child and I try to fill the emptiness I feel with food.
But the Made To Crave Devotional asked me to consider. One simple little word that I've never really taken into account what it really meant. I mean, when I started this blog originally it was to follow me into a life of wholesome eating and hopefully weight loss. But I didn't consider at the time that focusing on food, even healthy food, would just make me crave food more.
I have to eat. I've done fasts, and that is okay, but temporary. It's not a good way to lose weight but it is a good way to break that addictive cycle, but only if you consider. The reason fasting worked so well for me in 2006 (see my other blog) was because I was considering what God needed to change in me, and considering the fact that I needed more of God and less of myself and realized fasting would help me put my full attention on God. I prayed about it, prepared for it and stuck with it for 11 days. But then I was faced with a quesidilla and I didn't consider at all what would happen if I ate that quesidilla. I was hungry, I ate, and I regretted!
So, I was going to start a new blog, but the title of this blog just really stood out. I want a wholesome life. I want a life that is pure and pleasing to God. I traced the fall of my health (I was very healthy in my 20's) to a choice I made to compromise my values to try to please someone else, and to do that I had to allow myself to endulge in sinful behavior. This sinfulness made me fell unwholesome, unworthy and unwanted by God (although I know now that was a lie). Mostly it made me feel empty and lonely and HUNGRY. What I didn't realize is what I was craving was something only God could give.
I've gone through a lot of recovery and in a lot of areas of my life I've been healed and strengthened, but I am still obese. And it's because I don't consider. I just do. I just regret. I just enter into a cycle that is hard to stop because you do have to eat and it is easy to justify eating. I've never struggled with drugs or even really alcohol, but food is my drug of choice. I know what foods make me feel good and I sneak them and hide them and binge on them. That is the truth that I fear to share because it almost always leads to judgement and unsolicited advice on how to drop pounds.
But all I need to do is consider. For some reason that is working. Consider what I feel like when I eat a candy bar. Not just the physical sugar rush followed by the crash, but also consider the guilt.
"Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, 3 because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. 4 Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything." ~ James 1:2-4
The purpose of this blog is consider. Because considering leads to wholesomeness. I want to be mature and complete, not lacking anything. The purpose of this blog is to consider how my little choices can either lead me to obesity, despair and even death OR how they can glorify God. But I have to consider if I want to make good choices.
What have you considered today?
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