Greg Laurie on Forgiveness
Pastor Greg Laurie speaks about forgiveness. He does a great job. Click here for a short blog post from him.
Memories of Mom Part 2
What happens when your life is eaten up, not by wrongs currently being done to you but by the lack of forgiveness that you allow to remain for yesterday’s wrongs? Who really is affected by my refusing to forgive?
ME.
I have found that apart from forgiveness, I will be MUCH more likely to chow down, inhale food, binge, and also to do that constant-just-a-bit-more-than-I-need munching in agitation.
When I keep accounts up to date and run to God to tell on the one who has wronged me, feel the pain, and then choose intentionally to release it to his care, to embrace his death on the cross as being sufficient, something …well… “magical” happens. It is supernatural. It is God’s kind of magic.
I don’t mean the “sanctified denial” that says, “Yes, Lord, I know I am supposed to forgive, so I forgive all my family members and the kids I knew growing up for being mean.” That is a great place to start, but at least for me, I found that God walked with me and showed me I needed to get down and dirty…and really deal with how I felt at the time of the wrong (even going back 40 years! It affected me today!), allow the pain and sadness and anger to wash over me but this time, this time, take the hand of Jesus Christ as he walked with me. He led me to look to him for his intentions and purposes in allowing the pain in the first place.
If you know that there are people in your life…no matter how small they may seem or how far removed from now…that you need to forgive, I want to encourage you to do it. When we get hurt today at the grocery store by the rude clerk, often, it is like rubbing salt in an old wound that never healed. We over-react and we wonder why the lady we don’t even know got such a rise out of us. Often this is an indicator that there are unresolved (unforgiven) issues from the past. I need to intentionally go with God to these places and ask him to help me to forgive.
I did that in detail with my mom and I have to continue to do it each time it resurfaces.
This has transformed my relationship with food and my body (and my mom!). I believe it can for many of us.
Who do you need to forgive today? Will you?
Photo!
Oh my! We had a talented teenager take a bunch of photos for us of our family. This is one she has gotten back to us. OH MY! I LOVE IT! Hubby and I haven’t had our photo together like this in FOREVER! 🙂
BLOG NEWS AND NOTES!
- You may have noticed I changed the template again. I don’t know why, but I wasn’t liking that other template AT ALL any more. I have a web designer working on a new website for me and he will be integrating the blog. This one is only temporary, but I couldn’t wait any more! LOL!
- I have been praying about doing another study of the Thin Within book. If you are interested, please let me know in the comments here. I know that seems sort of lame–but I want an interactive study and need to know who might participate in real time with me. We would probably only do three chapters a week, making it a 10-week course and that, too, is only held loosely.
- I am forming a schedule for the blog so I can keep my focus and sanity. It goes something like this:
- One post a week for a post relating to the attributes of God from Ethel’s book and how focusing on that attribute affects our view of our bodies, food, and a battle with disordered eating. If any one else wants to get a copy of the book (I can’t believe that Kim in Japan didn’t win!)
- Two or three posts each week relative to a subject that comes up while studying the Thin Within book. Having the book won’t be necessary in order to benefit from these posts, but it might be helpful. These will have two components 1.) Devotional thought 2.) Practical suggestions
- One additional post each week from various and sundry things…I want to have lighter, fluffier stuff on some days…related to the same theme.
- One guest blog post every week or however often it seems to work. If you are interested in possibly writing a post to be featured here at this blog, please email me at cool horse woman @ gmail . com (push it all together when you email me). I will put together some guidelines and we can go from there.
And NOW the moment you have all been waiting for!!!!! The winners of the book contest!!! Each will receive a copy of Lord, Show Me Your Glory, which will be sent by the author (Ethel Herr) to her personally! A big ROUND OF APPLAUSE for:
MarinaRain
Kim
and Angeli (from Facebook)
Will those of you who won please do me a favor and send me the address (coolhorsewoman @ gmail . com) where the book should be sent? Also, please give me the name Ethel should use when she autographs the book personally.
Thank you SO much for participating everyone! I had quite a number of slips in the “hat” when I drew these three randomly!
Today: How can you celebrate the fact that
God is at work in you? 🙂
…being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you
will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.
~ Philippians 1:6
Grace to Accept Change and Press On
What happens when change happens? Will I praise God even then?
Today, I choose to look to the Lord for the grace to accept change where I need to accept it and the strength to pursue godly change, to observe and correct, confess and repent, where that is the appropriate response as well!
Praise the Lord!
I released 100 pounds from June 2006 to October of 2007 by eating when I was hungry and stopping when I was no longer hungry. I kept all of the weight off for a year–until the fall of 2008–but toyed with an anorexic mentality during that year…wondering how low I could get my weight, losing even more, grasping then at “normalcy” again, rebounding back up, and so on, in a cycle of sorts.
Then I began to gain steadily. Some of this was understandable, as I allowed the subtle erosion of godly boundaries. Having now been in the same jeans since December of 2009, I know that things have sort of stabilized. The dust has settled, the smoke has cleared and now I survey what remains.
First, I have to confess–this blog is not written by someone who is “cured,” “healed,” “victorious” forever onward. I choose to praise the Lord anyhow! 🙂 I believe God uses my constant challenges to build in me an inherent dependence on him. Oh! How I NEED him, desperately! I used to want to be “normal” (whatever that is). Now, I just want to learn to lean on him all the more. God will continue to use my challenges with food to draw me closer to him–Praise the Lord!
Secondly, I can see now my body has changed (age-related things, if you get my drift :-)). My size isn’t the only thing that is different. My hunger and satisfied signals have changed. What I had become dependent upon (wow…I just realized this) and relied upon and learned…these things have changed. With menopause have come a number of changes, including what my body feels like for “0” and what it feels like for “5.” (Not to mention how what weight I do carry is distributed very differently than ever before!) I am getting reoriented. I choose to praise the Lord!
Thirdly, the Thin Within principles still work and I continue to be committed to apply them. I have found that the adjustments I need to make now are similar to those that I have had to make in the past when I was sick, taking medicine, or under a lot of stress–the body reacts differently and some things change…like hunger signals. It has taken me this long to see that I am not like I was even a couple of short years ago. I choose to praise the Lord!
So, my story is that of a sojourner imperfectly walking the path and finding her way. My desire has always been to “arrive” and to tell you that you can, too. But instead, I see now that my message is that God is found here…out in this wandering, winding, path through the wilderness. Where everything else I depend on has changed, he remains the same. So, I am here, in the desert, needing him and the provision of “manna” daily…He alone is dependable. I choose to praise the Lord! I have HIM!
I have never really been here before, in this particular place. God really IS doing a new thing!
In many ways, I am beginning this journey afresh–as if for the first time!
God has extended me grace to know and accept that change happens. My body has changed…it looks different than it ever has. My hunger signals have changed. And I am growing to a place of accepting all of this. Now that I am over my disappointment that things aren’t like they were before…that this might not be quite so easy (the physical part of this…the rest has *never* been “easy”), will I allow HIM to be my motivation? The bathroom scale can’t taunt me or reward me as I don’t have one any more.
I choose to praise the Lord!
I am thankful for the grace to accept change happens, but I am also thankful for the grace to enact intentional change. I won’t embrace the mentality of “victim” and bemoan the realities of my aging body. Instead, I choose to praise God that I am at this new stage of life, that there are yet many new things to learn.
I will press on and choose to praise the Lord.
Praise the Lord!
How about you? Are there changes you need to accept? Are there changes you need to resist–they represent compromise and erosion of godly boundaries?
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This is the last day for the Praise Changes Thing Book Contest! You can win one of three copies of Ethel Herr’s Lord, Show Me Your Glory. Just comment here and you will be entered to win! Today is the last day to comment to be included in the drawing. I will randomly draw three names from my “hat” first thing (California time) Tuesday morning.:-)
Memories of Mom Part 1
Mother’s Day is tough for me. It is hard to get misty-eyed and sentimental for her.
My mom has played a huge role inmy battle with disordered eating.
True Confessions: Eating “nutritious” foods–those dense in vitamins, minerals with a lot of nutrient bang for caloric buck–is impossible for me without gagging. I can’t do it. Nope. Nothing doing. At least not as a general rule. I can’t eat salad or steamed veggies to save my life. I really can’t do it. I grimace involuntarily at even the *smell* of a stray piece of lettuce on a snack wrap at McDonalds ordered “sans” anything green on it.
An exception: I can eat my husband’s fresh, home-made salsa…by the spoonfuls! My mom never made fresh salsa. So, she never beat the tar out of me for *not* eating it. She never literally shoved it down my throat. She never greeted me the next morning with it and declared I couldn’t have any other food until I had eaten it like she did with the peas…cold…shriveled, the asparagus…withered, limp, or the green beans…
Is it any wonder I took to sneaking food? And yet the behaviors that I learned as a child, before I had obvious conviction of sin and God’s saving grace, became spiritual strongholds as an adult. Behaviors that had helped me to cope when I didn’t know what else to do…as an adult they stood in the way of coping.
I wish I could say the freedom that I write about here at the blog after ten years of exposure to Thin Within includes enjoyment of foods that are wholesome and beneficial. In fact, I would love to be able to snack on carrots and apples and other yummy foods that God created to be enjoyed.
But the truth is, I can’t, I won’t, I don’t even bother trying any more.
Once upon a time, I prayerfully stood over my kitchen sink and begged God to enable me to defeat this. With tears, I begged him to infuse me with tastebuds that LOVED a carrot…and as I took a bite, in faith, that THIS time would be different, the gag happened and I ended up feeling traumatized, a flashback to when I was 8 years old. Only this time, traumatized at my own hand. And I wondered why God didn’t answer “yes” to a prayer that seemed soooo according to his will. :-/
I have worked through a truckload of forgiveness of my parents–including my mom for this very thing. I don’t feel bitter about it. But it is a part of what I deal with, still, today, now, and it follows me everywhere.
The reason I bring all of this up today is because Mother’s Day is painful for me, so, I wonder if Mother’s Day is painful for any of you. Is it true for any of you that Mother’s Day isn’t the perky positive rosey flowers and chocolate event that Hallmark and Dayspring have us wanting to believe it is? In church, when people stand up to give verbal testimony to their moms, I always feel so…well…unchristian for not finding something to say that elevates my mom to appropriate levels of esteem in the eyes of my friends.
God has used my heartaches, trials, and, even, the abuse for my spiritual formation. I am desperate for him, largely because she was so wrong. While I must own my sinful choices now, I also acknowledge that my eating issues are directly related to the way my mom chose to treat me. My eating issues keep me ever always dependent on him, clinging to him like the hemorrhaging woman in the dirt. If only for a touch of the hem of his robe…if only to experience him, his power…and to be healed.
Apart from this weakness–which really is a product of a Mom with her own issues getting in the way of handling a young, strong-willed daughter–might I be even more independent, even more arrogant, even more resistant to hear his voice in the whisper?
God redeems. I have no doubt of this in my mind.
Yet, Mother’s Day is painful for me. I won’t blog a post saying otherwise. I wish I could. But I can’t.
So, how about you? Is Mother’s Day hard for you? Is there some way in which God may want to redeem the challenges you face today, perhaps due to a very human, fallible mother years ago? Will you let him?
More on that in Part 2…
NEW!
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