My horse, Harley is aptly named. Even at the ripe old age of 23, the “Arab” blood in my “Morab” comes to the surface frequently. He is zealous and energetic! In fact, really? He is my dream horse, being solicitous and cute and interactive with me…but he is also quite the stern task master. God uses my horses all the time to move me forward in my walk with Him, in the way I relate to people, believe it or not! (This is Harley and me on the trail yesterday…photo taken by hubby. :-))
In January, I got up on Harley when I knew better…I had a rough experience with someone who did an emotional “one-two” punch to my spirit and emotions. I was very wounded and agitated — wound up emotionally. When I try to be with Harley in that frame of mind, I know it is likely to be a wild ride. He won’t stand for it. On that day, he showed me (again…) in no uncertain terms that I must come to him a whole person, ok in my own skin.
I have had a “love affair” with this horse for six years. It has been rocky at times…because, frankly, life doesn’t always lend itself to me feeling “ok in my own skin.”
Many people love horse time because they feel like it is like a therapy session. Harley is NOT an equine therapist. While my experiences with my horses *can* be restorative and rejuvenating, with Harley, I better not come NEEDY to time with him. If I am in a “needy” place, I better ride Breezy instead or stay OFF a horse’s back all together!
Back in January, my rides on Harley before that emotional day and immediately following that day were wonderful. He affirmed again that, yup…it was all about the emotional baggage (or lack of) that I brought with me to our time together. “Leave it at the gate, woman!”
*That* day, however, when I brought my baggage with me (it was a fresh wound…what can I say?) was a rocket ride, ending with me bailing and, amazingly (and fortunately enough) landing on my feet and him coming to a halt, my hands on his mane…as if we had planned it together–some sort of “trick riding” and “flashy dismount.” HA!
Yesterday dawned, and, during my quiet time, I found myself very emotional–wounded–about some things I have been trying to process. A week ago, my husband set aside the morning in his Blackberry so that he could ride with me. This would be the first time in three months that Bob had ridden with me. Years ago, he would take time one day each week to go in late for work so we could have an early morning ride in addition to our Saturday morning ride. Life has been very hectic for him with lots of travel…we haven’t been able to do this. So this was SPECIAL! I had in mind showing Bob a great trail that Breezy and I had scouted out together. (I usually explore new trails with Breezy, who can handle my uncertainty as well as my emotional melt downs! LOL!)
As I went and hooked up the trailer to the truck, I was STILL wound up emotionally. Not only that, but my deep sadness…my mourning expressed with prayerful tears to God during my quiet time…had moved to ANGER. (It is a nice way of not feeling pain, I guess. :-/)I was wound up emotionally, all right–probably worse, even, than that day back in January! In fact, when my husband came out to the corral, I gave him a piece of my mind that I couldn’t afford to lose!
There I was, an emotional basket case…I really wanted to go on this ride with my husband, but KNEW I couldn’t ride Harley with the way I was feeling. He would be likely to give me a “western moment” or twelve…or he might push the ejection seat button… “Woman, you are NOT helping my life be peaceful and calm…GOOD BYE!” with a nice LAUNCH.
Clear as anything I knew that, if I was going to have a safe ride, I had to CHOOSE to let all that stuff go…I didn’t go into denial. Harley sees through that. As we drove from the house to the trailhead, I pondered the song “The More I Seek You” and the line that says “I melt in Your peace…” I asked God to help me to melt in His peace. He answered powerfully….He supernaturally enabled me to let the stuff go and to choose to forgive, to release the agitation.
Even writing it, it seems amazing. It was a supernatural shift in perspective. The issues were (and are) still there, but somehow they aren’t all consuming.
I am so glad I took care of this during our travel to the staging area. Harley knew the difference. *I* knew the difference. And Breezy and Bob were able to experience a much less stressful time than they would have if I had been astride Harley with all that baggage!
I had one of the greatest rides ever on him. In spite of it being a new trail, he was great for it. We even enjoyed a wonderful controlled little canter up a slight grade…(another amazing thing!) Hubby had a good time. 🙂 *I* did, I think Harley did, too! (And of course, Breezy did! 🙂
It struck me as we got back to the trailer how *good* I felt compared to how I felt as we left home…
My horse makes me a better person. With Harley, I have to be “on” with the Lord. I have to allow the Holy Spirit to be in charge–not my flesh. I can’t fake it.
What if I did this releasing thing, this “melting into God’s peace,” even when I am not riding? Maybe that is the point! 🙂 God wants me to learn to journey through life, releasing these things to him…honestly facing into them, but allowing HIM to carry the load.
Last night, I got to discover that all those burdens I was carrying? Well, I didn’t have the full story to much of it…the heart of it was missing from my understanding. God gave me a gift of seeing that all that junk I carried in the morning wasn’t mine to carry. Letting it go was precisely what he wanted…Now I am not only not nursing a sore bum from a flying dismount from my horse :-), but my heart is being healed by His Spirit with a more accurate understanding of things that God has allowed in my life.
Without Harley “demanding” so much of me, yesterday would have been MUCH different. Thanks, Lord, for using my horse to make me a better person…more like what You want me to be.
This journey has been about so much more than my weight…and it continues to be. Recently, God has shown me that I have continued to allow my perception of myself to be defined by my performance–externals–which, in the eyes of the world now appears to be “poor.” Having gained some of the weight I had lost, I am a “failure” in the eyes of the world (maybe even the Christian world!). I know in my heart that there is more at work here than that.
My eating, for instance, has been mostly within godly parameters during the past 2 – 3 months. The same parameters within which I operated to lose the 100 pounds and keep it off for a year. So, go figure. Bottom line… I know that I have God’s seal of approval! 🙂
As I have shared previously, I think my body has reacted to my choice to obey God about laying down the constant intake of caffeine (probably about the equivalent of 120 ounces of diet coke each day or more…). I think doing that has pretty well kept me at this “new” weight. (Again, God delights that I choose to obey him!)
I am realizing slowly and accepting even *more* slowly that THIS may be my “natural God-given” size and the previous lower weight may have been my “UNnatural, caffeine-given” size. It is a tough thing to swallow and shows me just how much I think like the world in this regard! I will continue to invite God to renew my mind and to transform my thinking. He is faithful.
When I began to read in The Search for Significance about shame, I realized that God has some lessons for me here. It is as if I have renewed a relationship with an old, familiar… …”acquaintance.” Shame seems to accompany me again… or it sure is trying to do so!
Shame often engulfs us when a flaw in our performance is so important, so over-powering, or so disappointing to us that it creates a permanently negative opinion about our self-worth. Others may not know about our failure, but we do. We may only imagine their rejection, but real or imagined, the pain resulting from it cripples our confidence and hope. The Search for Significance, McGee, page 101
With weight…everyone sees the “failure” or the “flaw in our performance.” It is a bummer!
I have made this “failure” so important and overpowering and disappointing…
But here is the deal. Having seen this, and been reminded of it again and again over the past few months, I WILL NOT allow it to define me! NO NO NO! 😀
Just as the quote above says, I have imagined people rejecting me over this and it has crippled my confidence and my hope! That is NO way to live.
God is continuing to work a change in my thinking. He is helping me to see just how valuable my choice has been to honor him about the diet soda–and that the struggle I have had since has been worth it. To the world, it may appear that I am another “dieting” failure. But I know that isn’t the case! I know that what I really am is a “laying the idols down” SUCCESS! 🙂
Going even deeper, though, I know what matters most is NOT my performance, but what Christ has done for me. He alone defines my worth and value. He is showing me more and more each day what that means…theoretically and practically speaking how it applies to my life when the rubber hits the road.
I waited patiently for the LORD; he turned to me and heard my cry.
He lifted me out of the slimy pit, out of the mud and mire; he set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand.
He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God.
– Psalm 40:1-3a
I continue my side trip through the theme of The Present, Not the Past, in keeping with the focus of chapter 7 of Get Thin Stay Thin.
The excerpts below are from The Search for Significance by Robert S. McGee. This book is being used by God to continue His transforming work…the “new thing”…from the inside out. It is flooring me how much God is at work changing the way I think.
…nothing forces us to remain in the mold of the past! By the grace and power of God, we can change! We can persevere and overcome! No one forces us to keep shifting our feet in the muck of old failures. TSFS, page 95.
Right now, I CHOOSE to get my feet (and face) out of the muck of old failures! I CHOOSE to step my feet on SOLID ground–the ground where Youdefine me through all you have done for me and in me in Christ Jesus. These aren’t empty words. You have done amazing things. Which will I value more? Place more emphasis on, focus on the most? MY behavior and performance (which is, of course, flawed?) or all YOU HAVE DONE? Jesus’ “performance” on the cross and His resurrection? Oh! It seems so amazing! So ridiculous that I would struggle at all with this! It is so clear to me in this moment!
From page 97 in The Search for Significance (not really a quote, but not really all my own words…sort of a paraphrase application…):
I am deeply loved, fully pleasing, totally accepted by the God of the universe. I anticipate that, as I continue to study God’s Word, experience loving relationships with other believers, I will gain a better understanding of the way God values me. This will improve my sense of self-worth, as my sense of who I am will be based on TRUTH–God’s Truth!
I want what the author has–past memories may be painful, but through Christ my present attitude about myself will continually change. I see how this will lead to life-long transformation relative to my struggle with eating and my body! It is a HUGE factor in all of this!
I know in my head I HAVE NO REASON TO BE ASHAMED and that covers a gamut of compulsive moments… Sure, I will continue to experience “failure” and “success” as I step out into new things (and try to improve upon “old” things I have done for years…). God will use these instances of failure and success to teach me that DESPITE MY CIRCUMSTANCES MY WORTH IS SECURE IN HIM!
Change is possible, but it is a process. TSFS, p. 98
Sometimes people get in a big hurry with the process of “losing weight.” Whether it be on the forums at the Thin Within website, at church bible study, at the gym–wherever!–there is an urgency to LOSE WEIGHT! But God is after a transformation in our thinking. If thinking differently, believing differently, and depending on HIM differently aren’t at the core of the physical changes, we have only reverted to yet another diet–even if it may not seem like it. The changes will be temporary.
Truly changing permanently is a lifelong process. P-R-O-C-E-S-S — Gosh, even typing it that way is too slow for me! LOL!
So let’s get out of the muck of our past and believe God for the new today and the future he has planned for all of us. We have heard and reheard Jeremiah 29:11 and it IS true.
“Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past.
See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland.
Isaiah 43:18-19
It IS true that God IS doing a new thing…right NOW. This moment! Toss off the muck of past failures and defeats…and yes, even past SUCCESSES! Sometimes those beat us up more than past failures. It doesn’t matter if you lost 390 pounds with Weigh Down or Weight Watchers…God wants to free you from weight beyond imagining RIGHT NOW! Me, too! He IS doing it! He promises that which he began he will complete! Let’s cooperate with him. Are you with me?
Chapter 7 of Get Thin Stay Thin focuses on “The Present, Not the Past.” I find my study of The Search for Significance pointing me to this emphasis as well. The chapters on shame have been very powerful…and I realize, now, that I have been on a pendulum that I only realized and mentioned here at the blog yesterday.
Too often our self-image rests solely on an evaluation of our past behavior, being measured only through a memory. Day after day, year after year, we tend to build our personalities on the rubble of yesterday’s personal disappointments.The Search for Significance, p. 96
This is NO way to live.
Here is a question…my past failures are a fact. The love, mercy, and power of God is also a fact. Which one will I value more? To which will I ascribe more significance to affect me today? If I continue to value my failures, I will continue to be absorbed by a “woe is me” sort of attitude…the feeling that I am “stuck.”
God’s Truth (big “T”) is way BIGGER than my truth (little “t”). He brings HIS Truth to bear on my truth unless I choose to value my truth more by saying I am stuck allowing it to define me. I love that he doesn’t ask me to deny my truth…he wants me to embrace HIS Truth and to allow it to override, influence, the impact of my truth on me now. (Don’t know if I am making any sense!)
Lord, I see this so clearly in this moment. All through the years I have allowed my sense of value to be based on my behavior–whether I’ve failed or succeeded–done well or not. So, when I lost all the weight, I felt like I was on top of the world! A success! I had arrived! The world noticed and celebrated! I felt good about ME! ME! ME! I was a conquering victor!
Then I began to desperately cling to that trophy…to the trophy of a thin body and to those Levis–instead of to you, Lord. Thank you that you have forgiven me for that.
But as my grip on those idols kept slipping, my sense of value and identity slipped with it. I was a failure in my mind. I clearly had not changed where my sense of value came from. I hadn’t really overcome the shame of the past (which is what I thought had happened because I felt so much better about myself), but I had only masked it.
Shame comes from letting my past poor performance define me. My shame was replaced by pride when I was performing better…”succeeding” in the presence. It was like the flip side of the same coin. I am so glad to see this right now. Lord, please let it change me. Thank you for showing me this truth.
I seem to keep swinging between pride and shame. Is it possible I never was truly free of shame? That the pride was really just masking the shame? Oh, Lord, remove it at its root! However painful it may be DO IT, please, Lord!!!
God has convicted me about how I relate to my past. Years ago (and along the way since) I went through a lot of my past experiences and faced abuses and mistreatment I experienced–as a kid, a teenager, an adult, from unbelievers and believers, from family members and those I barely knew, from classmates, close friends, and strangers. It hasn’t always been easy, but I have found joy and peace in being obedient to the Lord’s mandate to forgive, and have applied the blood of Christ, choosing to forgive “just as in Christ the Lord has forgiven” me.
I feel no obvious resentment, anger, or hostility for many of the things that I have “forgiven.” When I do sense resentment or anger surfacing, I typically have found such relief and freedom for *myself* in forgiving, that I work through it again rather earnestly, so as not to allow a bitter root to be established in my life with all the poison it can spread.
Nevertheless, in some ways, I seem to hold on to the past by pointing to it for a reference point for now. It is like if only I can show people what my past was like, how horribly I was treated in the past, and show in comparison just how completely God has transformed me, that is a good thing, isn’t it?
Well, yes and no!
Yes, it is a wonderful thing that God has taken my broken, battered, heart and life and transformed me from what I surely would have been apart from him, and given me a wonderful family–two great kids, a loving husband, a terrific home life…I am SO blessed! These are incredible things!
But, NO… I seem to almost relish the retelling of my past story a bit much so that I can take pride that I have not become what I would have been. In other words, I have formed my sense of my identity based, in part, on my past failures and my past life…which I have supposedly extended forgiveness for and been forgiven for… How much can I really be FREE of the past if I continue to retell the stories of the past, so I can point out “Look at how great I am in light of all I have been through?”
Obviously, I don’t go parading around stating it in such an obvious way (not usually!). People would see through that. It is more subtle than that but my flesh and the enemy of my soul delight in the way it trips me up.
If my identity or sense of who I am now is at all intertwined with who I was in the past, I am not entirely sure I am living in the present or can truly experience the freedom that the Lord wants me to experience in Him.
I may also NOT really be forgiving!
Forgiveness doesn’t mean forgetting, necessarily, but, like Robert S. McGee says in The Search for Significance it does mean that I won’t relish the memory for any purpose. At least that is my take on it.
Even with my Thin Within journey, I wonder about this. If I retell my story again and again about being a “dieting failure” and even a “Thin Within failure,” am I really forgiving myself for my past rebellions and indiscretions? Sure, there is a point where my testimony is valuable for encouraging others…but where does my emphasis–my focus–lie? Is it on what I was and “look at me now!” Or is it on what Christ has done? Am I really seeking to glorify Christ? Or self?
If I retell the failure part of my testimony again and again, is it possible that I am allowing that to define my worth and value a bit too much now? And then, just how big of a leap is it for me to take one of my “mistakes” todayand think, “See? I haven’t changed that much after all…I am still the same old failure, pretending not to be!”
Forgiveness is the desire to extend to another the freedom and release that we ourselves have been given at the cross.Get Thin Stay Thin p. 151
If I truly have forgiven myself for my choices in the past and have forgiven my mom, my dad, and others for wrongs done against me, I will want them to be free from that past, too. I will want them to be released. I will want to experience FULLY the freedom and release that Christ affords me…and want that for others as well.
I definitely won’t use the way I was treated or the way I behaved to make me feel better about myself now.
My horse, Harley is aptly named. Even at the ripe old age of 23, the “Arab” blood in my “Morab” comes to the surface frequently. He is zealous and energetic! In fact, really? He is my dream horse, being solicitous and cute and interactive with me…but he is also quite the stern task master. God uses my horses all the time to move me forward in my walk with Him, in the way I relate to people, believe it or not! (This is Harley and me on the trail yesterday…photo taken by hubby. :-))
time in three
I am so glad I took care of this during our travel to the staging area. Harley knew the difference. *I* knew the difference. And Breezy and Bob were able to experience a much less stressful time than they would have if I had been astride Harley with all that baggage!
