As I approached chapter 3 in Thin Within, I continued my running list of God’s attributes and the way he relates to me, His child. Praising Him for these truths sooo lifts my spirit and starts my day with my focus where it belongs…on Him! I only read, studied and prayed my way through the bottom of page 31.
Before I go ANY further, I want want WANT you to know how I feel about the “goal setting” activity. THIS IS IMPORTANT! 🙂 Thus, the additional video:
Giving Glory to God is the foundational purpose for your life. (Thin Within, page 28)
Note what is NOT the foundational purpose–that of being THIN! Or of weighing 135 lbs … Or a million other things that we might tend to chase after!
If we allow God to form and shape our character, we will become more like Jesus… (Thin Within, page 28)
Truly, this should be our #1 goal and the goal through which everything else is sifted! If goals that we set and our response to our behavior about these goals keep us from becoming more like the Lord, then we have to do some serious adjustment either of our goals, how we are thinking about them, or all of the above.
Therefore, I URGE you, I BEG you…do NOT make your physical goal a number on the scale! My goal is worded this way on page 31…as I shared in the video:
“After praying about it and inviting Him to indicate His will to me, my goal for [the end of the summer] is to be able to have more wiggle room in my Levis jeans (which are currently tight). I want to be able to move in them, work in them, ride horses in them without being goosed or rubbed raw.”
This is my physical goal regarding my size. It is NOT a weight. It is not even a “size”…it is “this pair of jeans will fit this way…” more than that.
If you feel like God wants to really shrink you down in size a lot by the end of the summer, then I encourage you to word your goal differently, too. “…my goal is to be…able to sit in the airplane seat in September without a seat belt extender…” or “…to be able to shop for clothes in Nordstrom’s instead of ‘Big and Beautiful’ stores” or… “to be able to sit in the chairs at the dentist office in August, without feeling the sides pressing in on my hips uncomfortably…”
See what I mean? 🙂 PLEASE ask God if he would have you do the same. Tell us about it here, ok? 🙂
PLEASE DO NOT USE THE BATHROOM SCALE AT ALL!!! I know this is radical, but you know how I have been singing the song “Focus on the Lord Focus on the Lord?” The scale is THE BEST WAY TO STOP FOCUSING on the LORD and to focus on yourself and your supposed performance! PLEASE DON’T GO THERE! You and I both have done that before and has it served us well? NO!
For the summer, will you PLEASE do something radical? Ask a best friend to keep your bathroom scale in the garage at her house and not to give it back to you until September? Or, better, throw it away?
PLEASE!
Judy Halliday likes to say that if we put as much effort into hearkening our God-given signals on the God-given HUNGER SCALE as we do on the man-made bathroom scale, we would release any excess weight and have lives of peace and joy! The scale is a tool of condemnation and can you condemn yourself into positive change? NO WAY!
Oh, my…I really am making a BIG deal about this. I mean it!!!!! In fact, I meet with my accountability partner in just about a half an hour…I am going to walk my talk and do that very thing…ask her to take my scale and lock it in her trunk!!! I don’t want it back!
Hi, everyone! Wow! We are hitting the trail running…or it seems that way to me. Let’s see how it works this week if we have as a very tentative goal, that of reading and working through three chapters–chapters 3, 4, and 5. I think this is a bit ambitious for me personally…but let’s see what happens! Let’s each go at the pace God directs us personally!
Here is the video for this week. I apologize that it is about 5 minutes long. I get excited about this stuff…
As you read chapters 3, 4, and 5 (or whatever the Lord leads), please do the following:
Keep adding to your list of attributes of God and the way he relates to you, His child.
Take time daily (or more often) to pray praises to Him and thanking him for these attributes on your list, asking him to make them more real to you. (I give an example of this in the video.) Praising and worshiping him in faith even if you struggle feeling the reality of these things makes a HUGE difference in our perspective and our walk on this journey (for our entire lives!)
Keep asking HIM about which “tools” mentioned in the book you should use right now. The tools can be tools of grace, but some of us need some more distance from dieting charts and graphs before we can use them that way. Just keep asking Him.
Invite HIM into your eating. If you make eating a time of fellowship with the Lord, I believe that the keys to conscious eating will (super)naturally become a part of it…for instance, if you say, “Lord, thank you for this food…thank you for providing tasty fuel when my body needs it,” you are likely to get a check in your spirit if you are NOT at a “0” yet! Ask the Lord to help you to get to know your body’s physical signals and then use what you learn to praise and exalt GOD, not the food, not the “good job” you are doing This is HUGE! It made all the difference in the world for me and will again! 🙂
As you consider each bite of the food and the swallow of the beverages you choose, again, focus your attention on and praise the Lord. Tell him how wonderful the tastes and textures are and then ask him to help you not to eat more than you NEED. I like to “offer” back the last couple of bites of any food I have been enjoying. Even if I took a very small portion, I can give back something to him. Typically, I have found that giving up those couple of bites doesn’t keep me from a comfortable “5”…and it sure helps to curb my tendency to be greedy. It is one way I keep my flesh in check, I guess (but it isn’t a law!) The fact is, I can get more to eat if, in 20 minutes I still feel hungry. I feel like I am most in the heart of God’s will when I delight in HIS creativity, HIS provision during my meals…It is ALL about HIM! 🙂
Remember most of all…if you focus on HIM and HIS greatness, you will experience a satisfaction in your soul that NOTHING else can touch! There are *reasons* we are drawn to food when we aren’t physically hungry and, often, at the heart of all of these reasons is a big emptiness that God alone can satisfy. If we develop an ability to focus on Him, praise Him, pray to Him, we will find that those things that lure us to food when we aren’t physically hungry will fade! Honestly! Not only that, but a lot of other challenges in our lives will fall into their rightful place. It is the “Seek first His righteousness and all these things will be added to you as well” principle again!
If you have time and feel led, I do hope you will post here what God shows you in your time with Him. Or post the link toyour blog entry if you are doing it that way. I don’t want to miss any of it!
We are studying the book, Thin Within, by Arthur and Judy Halliday. Come on along and join us! We are doing 2 or 3 chapters each week…so you have time to get the book and dive right in. Even if you don’t do the chapters at the same time that I post here about them, you can read whenever it suits you and join in here at any time. These blog entries aren’t going anywhere. In fact, if you go way back to the beginning of this blog, you will see my study of this book from November and December of 2006! 🙂 Still there! The internet is an amazing thing.
As you read (past tense) or read (present/future tense) chapter 2, I urge you to continue your list of God’s attributes.
Everything depends on our understanding of Who He is… (page 18, Thin Within)
Before I share my continued list, let me ask you…WHY is understanding Who God is so important to our journey? Why do you think the authors make this a focus? Why do I keep harping 🙂 on it here at the blog?
So, here is my continued list…along with some other quotes I want to highlight:
God ordained that I would be here now.
All the challenges and wonders that life offers, he knows about.
Nothing about my life is hidden from him.
As I was writing these things down, I was prompted by God to share with you that I definitely see myself as running from God…or running from something. I am doing this by being far too busy and over committed. I have written about this before. But I see that I need desperately to BE STILL AND KNOW that HE is GOD! In the past week, I have been reverting to old coping mechanisms and while diet soda consumption hasn’t returned to my life, I still have been depending on caffeine to get me jump started again! I share this by way of confession. It only took 4 days of not getting enough sleep and presto…here I am…So, by admitting this struggle here, I want to add to my accountability…and, perhaps, solicit prayer. It is important to me that I not just treat the symptoms…but get to the heart. To do that, I will have to be still. I have structured my life so that I feel like I can’t be still. This isn’t ok…so I have some difficult choices to make. Do I believe what I have said here and what I read in Thin Within and the Word of God about God’s character?
God is love
God is creative
God created me uniquely and very specifically
All of creation (including me) speaks of His wondrous glory
His divine imagination thought of you in eternity past and He created you especially for this space and time. All of creation, including you, speaks of his wondrous glory. (page 19, Thin Within)
He created the starry host and vast oceans.
He wants me to know Him.
He wants me to be authentic before Him <–this is what I am running from, at least in part! Go figure! :-/
God loves me.
God reveals himself.
He will meet and surpass any great expectations I have of Him
He is trustworthy.
He meets me when I am honest.
God is compassionate and gracious
God is slow to anger (please, let’s take note of this! :-))
God is abounding in love and faithfulness
So what on EARTH does any of this have to do with my NEED, DESIRE, EARNESTNESS, QUEST to lose weight????? 🙂 I am so glad you asked!!!
…God…wants to be your constant companion on your journey to healing and wholeness. (page 20, Thin Within)
If you think of God as a Cosmic Killjoy, you won’t likely want to depend on him on this journey. If you think of Him as angry and mean…you are likely to feel stomped on when you have a misstep or “blow it” in some way. The truth is, our God LOVES you as you are. He doesn’t operate the way so many of us think or have been taught! We want to know him as he really is.
God is gracious, loving and good. (Did you see this in chapter 2?) 🙂
God is wise.
Here is one connection between why we want to know God better and our desire to see changes in our physical bodies…
Since your body is one of God’s masterpieces (and since God is all of these things that we have been listing), it can be trusted. (page 20, Thin Within)
But, again, I want to reiterate…if we continue to focus on ME ME ME, we will miss it. We really will. So the most important reason that I will continue to shout from the rooftops that we must FOCUS on the Lord is because He is most concerned about the state of our hearts, not the size of the clothes we wear. He knows that when our hearts belong to him, everything else will fall into His perfect order and place in our lives and isn’t that we want, after all?
Getting back to chapter two, then, we now turn to some of the practical aspects of Thin Within relative to food and eating.
God is trustworthy. God made my body. Therefore, my body is trustworthy…I need to learn to listen to the God-given cues of hunger and satisfaction.
When I do this, simply put, I glorify and honor the God of this universe (I esteem his creation and exalt Him as wise and wonderful!) and I respect myself in a way that he desires.
Over the next few months, you and I will get to know these masterpieces that the Lord has made, our bodies. Instead of fixating on them, though, we will do it with a Godward focus. We will ask HIM questions we have. We will praise HIM when we experience a breakthrough. We will depend on HIS strength, not our own. We will not give in to the temptation to beat ourselves up. That is NOT His will and grieves His tender Father’s heart. (How do you feel when you hear your child say, “I was SO stupid!”)
I urge you to prayerfully read pages 20-23 where the physiological aspects of this process are discussed. Please don’t allow this to become a diet for you by fixating on this.
To honor God, who walks with us, and who leads and directs us, we need to honor the unique and amazing body He has made especially for each of us.
I loved reading (again) the quote from Isaiah 40 on the top of page 25…God doesn’t beat me up when I am weary (as I am now). He doesn’t have one ounce of disapproval in his heart…instead, he gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak.
Oh Lord, I am so weary and so weak right now. THANK you that I can run to you…you have promised not a “holy beating,” but to give me strength and to increase my power. You love me and accept me as I am and hope for loftier things for me than that which I settle for. Help me to run to you, to wait for you, to hope in you. To cease the striving…to trust the body you have given me. When it says it needs rest, to rest…when it needs food, to eat, when it needs water, to indulge heartily! Thank you for all your provisions. In the precious name of Jesus…Amen.
Hey, folks…this may be entry number 2 for today, but this is a quickie. If any of you would like to, you can download this pdf file of an Observation and Correction chart and print it out any day you choose to use it. Since we aren’t going through the book in 30 days and some of you might like to have these to record the Keys to Conscious Eating that you apply, I thought I would share this link. (They are in the book at the end of each chapter, too.)
Remember…charts and graphs are NOT things you NEED to do unless GOD says! Some of us find ourselves getting caught back in a legalistic dieting mentality when we try things like this…If that is the case for you, this might be a season that you don’t want to use these charts…it is ok!
But for those of you who the Lord may be leading to use this, there it is for your benefit as he leads! 🙂
Well, did you have the chance to go through chapter one and highlight, underline, and/or make a list of all of the attributes of God or his treatment of you asserted by the Hallidays? I did. Let’s compare lists. I am pretty sure this is only a partial listing:
God has a plan and purpose for me.
He has a future and a hope for me.
God has brought me to these pages…NOW.
He is a “mighty Way Maker.”
He is the Lover of my soul.
He is the Designer of my body.
He purchased my liberty.
He longs for me to see his handiwork.
His love for me is unfathomable.
His love for me is not based on my performance *or* size.
God transforms me.
God is crazy about me.
God loves me the way I am.
God is able and willing to lead me to freedom from food rules.
God wants authentic living for me.
He created me to be unique.
The Lord will meet my needs.
He wants to free me from worry and infuse my life with peace.
Again, this is likely only a partial listing. But…wow…if I BELIEVE these things…and I am pretty sure you could find support in scripture for all of them…I wonder how my life would be different?
If we are going to make this “leg of the journey” different than what has come before…we will have to focus on the Lord, focus on the Lord, focus on the Lord.
Let us allow him to remake our view of him, too, so that our focus is not on some false image of God. Let’s beg him daily that he would helps us to fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfector of our faith (Hebrews 12). We have focused on “fixing ourselves” long enough! We have tried not to think about food long enough…it is like trying NOT to think of a pink elephant! What do you think about when I tell you “Don’t think about a pink elephant?” Probably about pink elephants! So trying NOT to think about food causes us to think about it more. We have to replace our thoughts of self, food, weight, body with other thoughts! Let’s replace “diet thoughts” with thoughts of exalting our God. Let’s make this journey about getting to know him and praising the God we get to know.
Trust me…as we do, we will see transformation from the inside out. He wants our hearts…let us make room for him by kicking out thoughts of self! Let’s press on to KNOW him…the REAL him…not what others have taught us about him. Many of us have views of God that are plain old WRONG! It is no wonder we don’t want to focus on him…he is a cosmic ogre in our minds! Let us allow him to reform and reshape our view of him in TRUTH and then let us set our minds on that…on Him. Let us lift HIM up and magnify HIM instead of magnifying our “issues.”
Right now, I must confess my sisters…I don’t know if it is hormones, lack of sleep or what, but I am feeling so weary…and all about me. I want to whine right now! :-/ I disappoint me a lot! So in the list above of all of God’s attributes or treatment of me, the one that resonates the most for me right now is that His love for me is not based on my performance. I am so thankful for that.
Which from my list or yours from chapter 1 resonates the most for you?
Let us allow these things to be what our hearts are set on today…not on an image of health, thinness, or finally having our “issues” resolved. We want Jesus…we want Him high and lifted up. As we do that…I know that I know that I know that the rest will be worked out. I think, in a very real way, this is what Jesus meant when he said:
But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. – Matthew 6:33
Some other thoughts from the chapter that hit me afresh…on page 4, the Hallidays mention that we don’t want to go through this process resentfully. So often that is what we do when we diet. We should eat or not eat this or that and we hate it the entire time. How can we live like that? We can’t and don’t! (And shouldn’t!)
So, this time, we will develop a heart change…and if we make this all about God (as, indeed, it IS), then he will perform in us that which delights him…including the heart change! He transplants our hard hearts with a tender heart of flesh.
I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. -Ezekiel 36:26
These are things HE promises that HE will do! And as he does, we will thrill to surrendering our lives, our food, our body, our minds to him!
One other important thought…Being involved with Thin Within for a long time now, I have heard many people “come and go” and some say, “I feel like quitting.” Others have said, “Oh, I quit Thin Within…”
Here is the deal…Stick with me here and I hope this makes sense…I am not sure how we can “quit” once we start…as this isn’t about our bodies or diets or about Thin Within at all! It is about pursuing Christ for all we are worth and giving him access to our hearts, our appetites, our lusts, our emptiness, our need, our emotions, our passions…EVERYTHING. This is discipleship!!! We can’t quit that. Not really.
Sure, you could stop eating 0 to 5 (and maybe that is what those people mean), but what are the options…eating when the world’s diets tell you to? So that means my body’s cues don’t matter? That God doesn’t get to have a say over my physical body, but other diet plans will? You see, this isn’t about “doing” Thin Within. This is about “doing” GOD! 🙂
I hope that makes sense–or I think it will as we go on. But if you think of this as “doing” Thin Within, I think you may be disappointed…”doing” Thin Within may not “work.” It will be like a diet.
But if you are “doing” God…well…GOD WORKS! 🙂 It gets back to that heart thing. This may seem like the long way around, but, again, we know how to lose weight (and to find it again). We want the heart change that diets don’t form in us. Only God can do that heart transplant.
Does this make sense? 🙂
More points from the reading:
…much of your eating has been triggered by something that food can’t really satisfy.
BINGO! As you “wait” for hunger (and, again, this is NOT going to be a “growl”…please don’t insist that it be a growl!!!)…turn it to waiting for GOD. Waiting ON God.
Yet those who wait for the LORD Will gain new strength; They will mount up with wings like eagles, They will run and not get tired, They will walk and not become weary. – Isaiah 40:31 (NASB)
and
I wait for the LORD, my soul waits, and in his word I put my hope.
My soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen wait for the morning, more than watchmen wait for the morning.
O Israel, put your hope in the LORD, for with the LORD is unfailing love and with him is full redemption.
– Psalm 130:5-7
Waiting for the Lord will never leave us wanting. He WILL meet us. He WILL satisfy. This is where the wording of things is a bit awkward…If we wait for hunger, our focus is on our body, ourselves. But waiting on the Lord, our focus is on HIM. He will then say, “Guess what, dear one? Your body needs fuel now. Come and dine with Me!” Isn’t that a glorious thought? 🙂 No guilt, no condemnation, no self-focus. Then our meal time can be a time of praise and worship… “Lord, thank you for the amazing flavor and texture in this food. You are so creative! Thank you for the abundance. Thank you for supplying my needs. You are an awesome Provider! Thank you for my body that YOU have created–fearfully and wonderfully!”
Let’s DO Key to Conscious Eating #1: Today, how about if we diligently apply ourselves to this…to wait on the Lord and eat only when you are physically hungry. If you aren’t sure if you are hungry, ask Him. Don’t focus on your body by yourself (and definitely don’t obsess about it!), but take your questions about your body and how it feels to him and focus on Him and what HE says. “Lord, is this what my body feels like when it needs fuel?” He will give you a sense in your heart of hearts that “Yes, child…it is…” or not.
One final thing. The “Observation and Correction” tool is meant to be dispassionate and there will be a more detailed discussion of it in our reading ahead. If you find yourself straying…in any respect…in the way you treat your family, in something you did at work, in your eating, in your thinking or speaking…in ANY way…you can dispassionately observe. “I did _____. This doesn’t work if I want to maintain the godly goal of _____.” That is observation. Please don’t beat yourself up! That isn’t God’s way! Instead, plan a godly correction. “In the future, when that mean co-worker says she wants to meet with me, I will stop everything to pray for a moment and keep my mouth shut!” or “When my mom and I get together, I always feel so drawn to food after she leaves…I will plan some time with the Lord so that I don’t run to fridge the minute she leaves…”
It really is that simple (not EASY, but simple!).
Observe: “I get emotional when my mom comes over and eat as a response…”
and
Correct: “The minute she walks out the door, I will take a few moments to take my feelings to the Lord. I won’t even walk into the kitchen!”
None of this: “What a rotten, no good, ungodly person I am…I will be fat forever and I will probably die of a heart attack, so I may as well inhale the Oreo ice cream…”
NO WAY. None of that. We will allow God to transform our thinking and renew our minds according to His Word and He NEVER speaks to his children that way!!!”
As we continue into chapter 2 of the book, even though it is an opportunity to get to know ourselves a bit, I challenge all of us to continue making our lists of God’s attributes and how he relates to us according to the authors. See if you can add anything to your list.
I have out of town company coming today…so I am hoping to steal time away to prayerfully read chapter 2 and to blog tomorrow or Sunday. I may get behind a bit already in my blogging though! Hang in there, though! I am praying for all of us!
I realize this is the second post today…but I felt like the Lord wanted me to share thoughts about Chapter one…more tomorrow on that… ===
Chapter One…Ho Hum…here we go…again. Or so my very tired thoughts were this morning.
So, aware of my flesh wanting to minimize everything…I asked again for God to let my read-through of this material be NEW. I know that he can do anything, so I asked and then sat on the edge of my seat, looking forward with anticipation to just how He was going to do this. 🙂
And …well, he delivered. Immediately. Wow. Today, the title of this chapter struck me. I didn’t even get to the reading before he said, “How about this???”
Think about it.
FREE to enjoy God’s Lavish Love.
I want freedom to experience all God has. What keeps me from this freedom? What will this freedom look like? Wow…it has struck me that God’s Lavish Love is there to experience, but something often hinders me from it…I want to throw that stuff off. The chapter title really challenged me. All of the things I tend to TURN to when I feel weak…those are the very things that get in the way of me experiencing in REAL time…of enjoying…that which God has offered to me.
That is deep. I could sit and ponder/pray over that for a while.
Free to ENJOY God’s Lavish Love.
One thing I have learned is that God loves it when I am joyful…when I ENjoy something that He offers. When I don’t ENjoy his blessings, I miss it…and I think, to some degree, He must feel a sense of disappointment. He longs for me to ENjoy his Lavish Love…so…I think I will! 🙂
Free to enjoy God’s LAVISH love.
1 John 3:1 says: How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him.
Used as an adjective, Dictionary.com says “lavish” means: expended, bestowed, or occurring in profusion
God pours out his LOVE on me in this way. How great the Father’s LOVE is for me!
I want to ENJOY it freely! 🙂
If you have not yet read chapter 1 in the book, I want to encourage you to underline, highlight or take note in your journal of everything that the authors say God is or does. They make a lot of assertions about God’s character and intentions about you, His child. Jot those down whether they are quotes from the book or implied only. Ask God to show you if you believe these things!
I challenge you to begin to wait for physical hunger before you eat. (Yes, I know some may take issue with this phraseology, but I think it fits for people just starting out or others of us who “pre-empt” hunger by eating for a variety of *other* reasons!). Note when you are drawn to eat and *aren’t* hungry and ask God to show you if you are not hungry, what it is that is making you think about food–why are you drawn? Food only satisfies physical hunger. All other “needs” or wants require something else to be satisfied.
What do you learn about yourself and about God as you wait for physical hunger before eating?
