This little girl is wise beyond her years. What she shares in this video is really at the root of so much. I hope you enjoy!
How would having faith like Bailee change you, your eating, your living, your view of yourself, your view of God? What can you do today to allow God to renew your mind and transform your thinking?
I have a friend with thin thighs…she is in a wheelchair and can’t walk. :-/
My thighs aren’t thin, but I am blessed to be able to walk and run and leap.
I love my thighs.
I can’t get the little girl in the video I shared yesterday out of my head. (I do wonder where that little girl is today, nine years later, and if she still stands strong in affirming so many things about life and herself or if she has fallen prey to the joy stealers in life like so many of us do.)
The little girl really got me thinking about affirmations. Does it honor God for me to say “I like my thighs,” “I like my hips,” “I like my arms…” etc? Or is it, like my teenager suggests, lying? That is a good question, but yesterday, as I played tennis with my daughter, I found myself wanting to emulate the young girl in the video. I said it out loud to “try it on.” Chasing down tennis balls, I declared with boldness (after looking around to be sure no one was likely to hear me): “I like my thighs!” and you know what? In that moment, I really did! Saying so, really seemed like a huge step of victory for me! Without my thighs and legs and knees, I wouldn’t be able to enjoy playing tennis or any number of other things out there. No, I may not like the way my thighs look, but I know that the function of my thighs is worth far more than appearance and I think my wheelchair-bound friend would agree.
A couple of days ago, even before I shared the video with you all, I posted something at the Thin Within forums (found at http://www.thinwithin.org/forums) in response to someone lamenting that they don’t like the way her body looks. Since I have had so many changes in my own body, I responded:
I understand frustration with physical appearance. I used to think in my arrogance (I am ashamed to say) that people that blamed menopause for any number of things didn’t want to “own it”…but now I see that there are some legitimate things that come with menopause.
In my case, I lost 100 pounds using principles of Thin Within. I finally was a “success story.” Kept it off relatively effortlessly (though with fear, I must admit) for a year…and then started gaining some back. I threw out the scale a year ago. I have no idea how much weight I gained before I stopped gaining and, for me, it all connected with the timing of “The Change.” I started going through “The Change” of life when the weight came on and I stopped gaining when “The Change” was over.
Now my size has stabilized again and I feel like I am eating like I used to back when I was smaller, but it is sustaining a bigger size. (Please note, I know that I have not been “stellar” in obeying the Lord’s voice in my eating as well. )
So a couple of things are different for me… my “natural God-given” size may be different than I thought…and my shape is different…and…well, I look at my body now and I carry weight where I didn’t carry weight before…my thighs. I mean…disproportionately, it seems. Even at 250 pounds, I don’t remember my thighs ever looking like they do now.
But I can still walk, run, leap and play.
God is helping me work through a disdain for my body all over again…something that I thought I was past in 2006.
I have been pregnant three times and carried two babies to term. I have nursed them. I have climbed mountains, ridden horses, worked to build fences, played in the snow with my kids, run around tennis courts, stood to sing praises to God, bowed low to worship my God, held, hugged, laughed and cried. I have stroked away a child’s tears, I have loved my wonderful husband. I have worked to exhaustion and played until I could drop…My hands have strummed my guitar as my voice has led God’s people in worship. My hands have held rags that have wiped faces and my feet have carried me a million places…my body serves me well. It has for 48 years and it will continue to do so.
Goodness, my body is an amazing creation! The size, the shape, the lumpiness, of it really doesn’t seem nearly so significant. When I feel disdain for my body’s appearance, I realize that I am stuck in the mindset of the world and I now beg God to renew my mind so that I can have changes in my thinking.
I love my thighs…
How about you? Can you take time right now, in faith, to affirm your body, knowing that God has given each part of your body to you as a gift? Let’s ask Him to help us renew our minds and to truly delight in the amazing creation–our body–that he has entrusted to us!
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Long ago, I tried to apply the principles of eating according to physical cues and to go to God for all the other times I was tempted to eat when I wasn’t physically hungry. For some reason, I just couldn’t pull it together. What sounded so simple on paper or on the computer screen seemed a huge impossibility for me. Of course, this made me feel like I was nuts. Why couldn’t I do this? It seemed so simple!
In those days, I didn’t realize it, but there were truly reasons I was in a place of “I can’t.”
I didn’t understand that. So I would beat myself up. I looked at the whole thing–all the weight I wanted to lose and how I constantly ate more than I needed–and just didn’t have a clue why it seemed so HARD. I felt so hopeless!
“I can’t DO this!”
I was right! I couldn’t.
But God wanted to take me PAST the “I can’t!”
God was at work in my life doing things, teaching me things, leading me into recovery over trauma…to forgiveness of myself, others, and, even, Him. I didn’t realize how much I had allowed things I had done in my past or that had been done to me to define me. There was such shame there. God had great plans to free me from all of that…In fact, at the cross the victory had been won. He wanted me to experience it.
I literally had emotional “triggers” that God wanted me to bring to him. His will was for me to stop being in that place of “I can’t.” He used this struggle to show me I needed to bring each of these things to him, to confess what I was struggling with and to ask him for HIS will in this thing. It meant sitting in the pain and emptiness. It meant waiting. NOT something that is fun to do. How much easier it is to stuff the emptiness with food. But he wanted me to wait wait wait…and invite Him into the thing that was causing me grief.
It is a bit more complicated than I have made it sound, but the fact remains, it was a time when “I can’t” was a fact of my life more often than not.
Much healing has taken place. God has taught me a great deal. He has brought me through a ton of stuff and I wouldn’t trade the painful poking, prodding, and flushing out of the wound, given all I have experienced, all He has given me. He continues to do this today of course with the many many “do overs” that he brings my way. But more and more I see what is going on and I welcome it…well, sort of. At least more than in the past.
In any event, something that struck me not that long ago is this: At this stage of my life, any struggle I have to respond to my body’s physical cues to eat or not eat…well, it no longer boils down to an “I can’t.” It is now, simply, an “I won’t!”
Yup, now I am in a different place. I must admit that it is really really humbling, but with all the healing God has brought to me, the experience of living according to these principles imperfectly, but nevertheless seeing changes inside and out, with the renewing of my mind that he has done…wow. I have been transformed! I see it so clearly most of the time! I think differently about food, about portions and, even, about my body and about who I am. Sure, there is still room for much growth. Definitely! But right now, I am in a radically different place than 5 or 10 years ago.
5 or 10 years ago, it really was an “I can’t.”
Now, when I am out of line in my eating, it is definitely more of a rebellious, “I won’t.”
So, what is it for you? Do you find yourself again and again saying, “I can’t do this! What is wrong with me!?” If so, then I urge you…first, don’t beat yourself up. You may really be in a place of “I can’t!”
But secondly, you can experience God’s grace and healing in a practical way. I suggest that you stop focusing on the food and your body and start welcoming what he plans to do INSIDE you. It seems the long way around, perhaps, but it is where the change HAS to begin.
For others of you (and I include myself in this), if you have experienced his healing emotionally and you know that saying “I can’t” now is really somewhat flaky, then join me. Let’s face into our rebellion head on and refuse now to claim “I can’t.” Let’s choose to give God credit for the work He has done and own that we are really digging in our heels to say “I won’t” instead. Sure, let’s keep allowing the inner healing work. But let’s also own that we can TOO say NO to food when we aren’t hungry! Like Dr. Rita says in her book, Jesus is the Lord of me and he says I am lord over my food. I can TOO say no!
For me, I have to be willing to use words like “obey” and “sin” to describe what I am doing (or not doing). That is all there is to it. It isn’t about if I feel like eating the way God calls. It is about obedience. It is about all the other things that happen in life that I want to deal with by eating and, instead of eating, asking God what HE wants for that moment, that experience, that pain.
Again, I am speaking to myself and to anyone who, like me, has seen a huge inner healing and transformation that God has done already. If you know you haven’t yet allowed God access to your unmet needs, expectations, disappointments, and deep wounds, then sure… “I can’t” may be more accurate. Please, then, know that it may be time for you to stop fixating on the scale, the food, clothes, etc., and time to be still and know that He is God. It is time to feel the pain and bring it to him. He will bring you to a place where you can in the strength He provides.
For those of us who WON’T, let’s quit with the “I won’ts.” One moment at a time. Ask for God to soften our hearts to make us willing and do our part to BE willing. Wow, there are blessings in obedience. It is awesome to walk in humility and praise God for the way He is at work in us to will and to do HIS good pleasure!
Listen, O daughter, consider and give ear: Forget your people and your father’s house.
The king is enthralled by your beauty; honor him, for he is your lord.~ Psalm 45:10-11
God is doing a new thing…right now, today. This is a fact! I want to rejoice in it, delight in it. To do so, I must release my hold on my past, be it 2 minutes ago, 2 decades ago or more!
For me, one of the biggest issues is the way I was raised…the memories I have from my childhood and the things I have come to believe about myself and about God that are rooted in my upbringing. As my eyes fall on this passage, the mandate from my Lord to forget my people and my father’s house is powerful. So much of who I am today seems bound up in the past!
But that is just the point! Early in my life, I learned to use food to cope with disappointments and emotions I didn’t want to feel. I learned, too, to believe the lie that food is my enemy.
God calls me to choose to forget these things…to choose to allow him to renew my mind as is spoken of in Romans 12.
Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy,to offer your bodies as living sacrifices,holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship.Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world,but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.Then you will be able to test and approvewhat God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.~ Romans 12:1-2
But more…Psalm 45:11 tells me that I have a new truth to believe. That truth is that the King is enthralled with my beauty! Can I embrace this belief? Will I choose to believe what God says? Will I allow him to trade my old ways of thinking, rooted in “my people” and “my father’s house” and replace it with this truth that he speaks over me? To do so really would be a new thing.
How about you?
If you were to let go of all the things that you believe about yourself and trade that for believing Psalm 45:11, that the King of the Universe is enthralled with your beauty, how might this affect you today?
Feel free to use the comments part of this blog to respond.
I don’t know about you, but if I were to believe God in this, if I were to allow this thought, that He is somehow “enthralled” by my “beauty,” to go with me through the day, I believe I would live differently…and truly, radically, experience that “new thing” that God is at work doing!
I hope you are pressing on in this journey. I know I am. God has called me to linger longer in His Word in the mornings and that has “cut into” my blogging time! I plan to get readjusted in balancing my time with this renewed call to study His Word. I just can’t get enough of it. That is a good thing. Not writing isn’t what he has in mind for me, so I know he will show me where to adjust so I can write.
Today, how about prayerfully pondering this quote:
Grace frees us to walk in the truth that nothing can separate us from God’s love. Our performance cannot; our brokenness cannot, nor can our pride or lack of self-worth. Embracing his boundless love frees us from our self-imposed performance-based prisons. God’s grace and love are not based on what or how much we eat or on how often we exercise. (Smith and Halliday, HEAL, page 89)
Do you agree with this statement? Do you believe it to be true? Do you live like it is true? How? What do you need to do or change to live out what is true–that nothing can separate you from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord?
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