by Heidi Bylsma | Nov 18, 2008 | Blog
I plan on returning to summaries of The Lord’s Table soon, but today, I could tell I needed to deal with some things. I turned to “Freedom from Emotional Eating,” by Barb Raveling, instead of working on The Lord’s Table.
Yes…this is what I needed. What I need. Present tense.
Yesterday, I struggled a lot with urges to eat and to revert back to drinking soda. I didn’t give in to the soda drinking. (I will write about this another time, as I think diet soda has been a huge stronghold in my past…one I never totally resolved to give up, but have now…hopefully, permanently.)
I was amazed at how drawn to food and soda I felt all day.
My accountability partner asked the right questions of me and prompted me to allow God to help me work through this. My tendency was to just “blow it off” as “Ok, so I am feeling emotional.” But to be honest with you, calling it emotional eating without DEALING with it, isn’t even as good as throwing a band-aid on it. It is like seeing a wound and saying “Yup, it is bleeding” and leaving it at that.
In Barb Raveling’s workbook, “Freedom from Emotional Eating,” the reader is urged to go beyond recognizing there are emotional triggers, to actually doing something about it…to speaking TRUTH into the situation. This is done through “truth journaling.” This is a remarkably simple thing to do, I found, yet profound.
The enemy seeks to take us captive by messing with our heads…the old “You deserve to eat this…” or “You will feel better if you have that…” thing.
Truth journaling happens in a couple of ways. One is to call a lie a lie regarding this notion that food will make me feel better when I am emotional. It doesn’t. Not only does it NOT make me feel better five minutes from now (after I have inhaled it), but it makes things worse. I still have to deal with the emotions, but it is then compounded by the guilt and frustration with myself for trying to numb it with food. Truth journaling exposes this. And it does so very specifically…not generally, as I have just done in my explanation.
For instance, if I am tempted to eat a chocolate muffin when I am not hungry and it is because I just survived my son driving us through the canyon together (he just got his permit), I write down how I am feeling, “I want a chocolate muffin right now. I am not hungry. I want it because it will make me feel better. I deserve it for enduring the stressful drive through the canyon.” I then go back and number the thoughts: 1. I want a muffin. 2. I am not hungry. 3. I think the muffin will make me feel better. 4. I deserve the muffin.
Then, for each, I label if it is a truth or lie and what the corresponding truth is for that lie:
1. True. I want the muffin. 2. True. I am not hungry. 3. LIE. The muffin will NOT make me feel better and will, in fact, make me feel worse because of how I feel when I violate my boundaries of eating only when hungry. 4. LIE. I don’t “deserve” the muffin. The muffin isn’t a “reward.” Knowing that I have hung in there doing what God has called me to is a very great reward and I will praise God for my safety and delight in his joy over us!
Another approach is to deal with the emotions…this goes to the heart of it. I spent some time this morning doing this very thing and I feel better equipped to handle the day.
I am emotional with good reason. 1.) My son is driving now and living where we do, the roads are windy, narrow and everyone on the roads is insane. 🙂 2.) My horse, Breezy, gets seen tomorrow by a specialist for what may be cancer in his eye. 3.) My schedule is so jammed full of things this week that I am overwhelmed. 4.) I have a website I am developing that has taken on a life of its own for a client who I have worked out a “trade” with and now I just want it done.
I have a strong emotional response to each of these things. This morning, as I truth journalled about some of them (and I will go back and do the others), I was able to invite God to expose the lies that are at the heart of some of my emotions about them. Certainly, while worry about Breezy is understandable, it won’t help matters. In fact, Breezy senses my anxiety and it adds to his own, making it more difficult for the vet to treat him. I have anxiety about the money this will cost and, again, worry won’t help this. It is what it is.
See how this works? As I allow God to speak truth into these situations, I am better equipped to pray through them and not to yearn for food which doesn’t help matters anyhow. God is my healer and my helper. He knows all things. He knows right now about Breezy’s eye and what is causing it.
This seems so simple right now as I share it. I almost want to delete this post because I assume people might say “Duh!” But it really IS profound.
The trick is, in the moment when I feel tempted to eat or to guzzle a diet cherry pepsi, I must be willing to stop and evaluate what is TRUTH in the situation? It isn’t likely that drinking or eating something will EVER be the TRUTHful answer to what is going on.
How about you? Can you take stock and see what the truth is about why you are drawn to food? Or, at the very least, evaluate whether having this candybar or that second helping of enchiladas will *really* make you feel better, happier, whatever an hour from now? 🙂
I want to live out my freedom. As Beth Moore said last week, we can’t have our milestones until we can take captive the moment. I see Barb Raveling’s truth journaling idea as being an invaluable way of capturing the moment for the Lord and allowing my mind to be renewed with his truth…
I hope you do, too! 🙂
by Heidi Bylsma | Nov 11, 2008 | Blog
Wow…WOW! The introductory session of Beth Moore’s Breaking Free taping was last night and it was…well, incredible.
It got off with a rousing start when Lisa Pierre led us in singing “Break these shackles off my feet so I can dance! I just wanna praise you, I just wanna praise you!” I shared the way God used that song in my life here at the blog a couple of months ago (including a link to the YouTube video). So I was into it for sure! 🙂 From the looks of the other 999 women here in New Orleans at the Franklin Avenue Baptist Church, they were too!
Some thoughts…first and foremost, when God speaks to me about the same thing numerous times in just a few days, I know I need to take note. The thought “Renewed Mind” has come up again and again. I wasn’t suprised to hear it here relative to the Breaking Free study–having gone through the BF study years ago and leading a couple of groups through it, I know that renewing the mind is a vital part of breaking free. Well, that and the fact that I have seen it in my own life.
But I know God is doing another new thing! It has come up enough times that I know he wants me to catch something new. So it is my quest to be still and know that He is God and what He has to say about the renewal of my mind. It was mentioned in Freedom From Emotional Eating bible study by Barb Raveling which I started last week. I hope to share my journey through that material here after I finish sharing The Lord’s Table.
The thought of the renewed mind was also the focus of the bible study we did at our Neighborhood Fellowship Group — the focus verse being Romans 12:1-8. We talked about what it means to renew the mind.
In any event, God is up to something. I am here at this video taping. 11 intense BIBLE teaching sessions!!!!! Never have I been through something this intense…and with Beth Moore no less who is big on truth and grace…
So here are some thoughts I jotted down this morning as I reflected back on the introductory session:
The focus verse is Isaiah 61:1-4. You will probably want to look it up in your bibles. Check it out and then ask God to bring it home to your own heart.
Lord Jesus, you have been annointed and appointed to preach good news to the poor. Thank you for accepting that calling. You have been sent to bind up the broken hearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners…all of this you’ve done aginst evil that has previously prevailed, Lord. YOU HAVE ENDED THE REIGN OF DARKNESS IN MY LIFE.
Not only that but you are proclaiming the year of the Lord’s favor. Oh, I praise you that I stand in your favor!!! You also proclaim the day of vengance of our God. The enemy will get his! You are comforting those who mourn, providing for those who grieve, and bestowing on us all a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair.
You are changing us — me — to be an oak of righteousness, a planting of the Lord for the display of His splendor.
We will rebuild the ancient ruins and restore the places long devastated; we will renew the ruined cities that have been devastated. Oh, Lord! How appropriate that this taping is here in New Orleans in a church that was just rebuilt after the Katrina devastation!
Lord, please help me not to miss what you want to do in me today, this week, through this bible teaching time with Beth Moore.
To preserve copyright and all of that, I won’t share my notes from the session. But she used Isaiah 9:4…to speak about how there is a pattern that God sees in us before freedom and how he chooses to break us free from bondage, from the yoke, just as He did the Israelites from Midian.
She took us into the scriptures in Judges chapter 6 all the way through verses 1 through 24. If you walk through the passage, you will see the parallels, too. Here are some questions to get you thinking about it all.
1.) Who are the people that are in bondage?
2.) Describe the nature of this bondage.
3.) Go to Lifeway’s Bible Tools at http://bible.lifeway.com/crossmain.asp. Click on KJV with Strongs. Then type in the little box that says “Books” the following: Judges 6. Find verse 6 and click on the word “impoverished.” How would you describe the state of God’s people when they were under the oppression of the Midianites based on the definition of the Hebrew Word (which is what you just found if you followed these instructions)?
Beth pointed out that bondage is anything that hinders me from being what God wants me to be. I am meant to bring Him glory by the producing of much fruit (John 15:8). The oak of righteousness mentioned in Isaiah 61 produces many many acorns!
4.) Look in the Judges 6 passage. The Israelites weren’t looking for freedom. What had they done instead? Can you identify with this?
5.) What does God do with this? How does this relate to 2 Corinthians 10:3-5 and your life?
I trust Beth and Lifeway won’t mind my sharing some of the words I jotted down near the end of the session. They are powerful…
Whatever it is that God calls you or me to give up…let’s not be afraid to give it up. Let’s instead be scared to miss what God has for us if we cling to something instead of releasing our hold on it. Beth pointed out so eloquently that sometimes we have no idea how oppressed we’ve been until we’ve been set free.
She closed with words like these:
What future do you want? Will you choose to grow old and die in your bondage?
No, Lord, I choose FREEDOM!
by Heidi Bylsma | Jul 27, 2008 | Blog
And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years.
She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors
and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better she grew worse.
When she heard about Jesus,
she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak,
because she thought, “If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed.”
Immediately her bleeding stopped
and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering.
At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him.
He turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who touched my clothes?”
“You see the people crowding against you,” his disciples answered,
“and yet you can ask, ‘Who touched me?’ “
But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it.
Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her,
came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear,
told him the whole truth.
He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you.
Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.”
– Mark 5:25-34
“God’s way is the way of faith and freedom. When we bring our struggles with food, eating, and weight to him in honest surrender, we can be restored. For this to happen we must allow God to lead us to a place where we are:
- Free to risk–letting go of the past in order to live unencumbered in the present (1 Peter 5:6,7)
- Free to change–being transformed from the inside out by the renewing of our minds (Rom. 12:2)
- Free to trust–trusting God and the way he made us (1 Cor. 6:19)
- Free to love–loving as Christ loves us (John 13:34)
As we act in faith and surrender to this kind of freedom, we will experience a new relationship with God, with ourselves, and with our bodies.”
(Get Thin, Stay Thin page 12 – Formerly Thin Again)
———
This idea of being free to risk has really hit me afresh. We talked about this in our Thin Within online support group chat the other night. If we give our coping mechanisms–if we dare to reach for the hem of Jesus’ robe even while we lay hemorraging in the dust–what if he doesn’t choose to heal? What if he doesn’t choose to change me?
The hemorraging woman in Mark 5 believed that just a touch of Jesus’ robe was all she needed. In that act of faith, I wonder if she got more than what she bargained for–God’s power surged through her in a burst of healing. She had risked everything she had left–all her hope, all her dignity (if she had any left)–to weave through the crowd even though the culture had declared her “unclean” for years. She had tried everything else–and had always come up with dashed hopes. She had to be free to risk…this time the last of her hope as well as everything else. With the last bit of daring she could muster she lurched for the hem of his robe–even through the crowd of people, all who hoped to get closer to him…
As she risked it all, dared to put “all her eggs in this basket,” she experienced transformation. But in order to do that, she had to be willing to risk losing it all…again.
When we come to the Lord with our disordered eating, and choose to change the way we cope with anger, with frustration, and with all our other emotions…when we willingly surrender the way we have turned to food in order to cope, we take a huge risk. How will we cope now?
We begin to see the truth–the truth that sets us free–that our issues with food, eating, weight aren’t about food–not really. It is about something so much deeper and thus, it has the power to hurt so much more profoundly. What IF I hope and am disappointed? What if I am left…hungry…I mean with my soul hungering yet?
IS it worth the risk?
I wonder…had the bleeding woman not been healed if she would have regreted the act of lungeing for Jesus’ robe. I wonder if, in spite of disappointment, there would have been something in her that would have rested in resolution. Somehow, I don’t think she would have regreted taking the risk, even if things had turned out differently.
But things didn’t turn out differently. She was healed.
Am I willing to let go of the past in order to live unencumbered in the present? That means letting go of the way food has comforted me, been a companion for me, numbed me to anger and pain…been the focus of my Saturday nights and celebrations. Am I willing to let go of all the “been there done thats” that have come before and believe that God is even now doing a new thing? Am I willing to risk?
Are you?
I challenge you to journal a prayer about your willingness (or lack of). Ask God to meet you where you are just as he met the bleeding woman.
NOTE: I am leaving for DisneyWorld early tomorrow morning. My daughter and I are meeting up with my dear friend, Jan, and her daughter for 5 days in the happiest place on earth! If I don’t have a chance to blog while I am gone, I will see you when I return!
by Heidi Bylsma | Jun 2, 2008 | Uncategorized
I am going to date myself. Do you remember the song from the 70s, sung by Roberta Flack, “Killing Me Softly?”
Have you ever felt like someone has been reading your journals and is talking to YOU or, worse — others— about what is there? Or that someone knows even the unspoken, unwritten…maybe unspeakable things in your heart…is bringing them to the surface…exposing you?
That is how I felt last weekend when I spent some time watching video Session Two of Stepping Up by Beth Moore.
Beth was in my home via my laptop and Windows Media Center. The morning was quiet – sunlight flooding my bedroom through the tree-framed, glass door. My golden retriever (psycho) dog was earnestly standing guard to prevent the reflections and shadows from causing any harm. All normal things, on normal mornings…
As Beth drew me in to the video session focusing on the Feast of Unleavened Bread and its applicability to my life, rather than Don McLean (who “Killing Me Softly” was written about), it was the Lord who was “strumming my pain with his fingers, singing my life with his words, killing me softly with His song…”
“Hidden Hypocrisy…”
How did she know? How did Beth know that, like the symbolic gesture of holding back a little bit of “dough from a former baking,” I, too, had been holding something back, not ridding myself of ALL the yeast in my life. Like the fermented dough “hidden” in the flour, this tiny little bit seemed so harmless…but it had been working its way through everything, affecting all of it…
From the human, worldly perspective, from all outward appearances, I, Heidi Bylsma, have been a “Thin Within Success Story.” (Can you hear the tooting of the proverbial horns!?) In fact, my “success” has been proclaimed from the rooftops — literally, even in a national magazine. With more on tap this summer…
Mud on my face!
FIRST magazine ran a feature last December.
To add to my chagrin (the timing is oh-so-interesting), the July/August issue of Health magazine will include an article on “Mindful Eating,” including possibly a paragraph about my testimony with Thin Within. Quick and Simple’s August issue may have a feature on yours truly…(unless the Lord says otherwise, and He may…) Announcing yet again, “Here I am world!” “Look at me!” “God has done a new thing in me!” (More tooting of those horns…the head getting ever larger…)
Yet here I sit as I type this entry, wearing my “skinny jeans,” wondering if these well-worn, well-used, Levi 550s have *shrunk* some more (hmmm….no, I don’t imagine so after being washed at least 100 times!). Yes, they feel uncomfortably snug around the waist. :-/ But worse, there is a knowing that:
I am not as I claim.
Hidden Hypocrisy….
When did I let it become all about the outside—even while claiming it was about so much more? When did it stop being about GOD and being about ME?
I was challenged in my Beth Moore Stepping Up lesson yesterday, too. Have I begun to trust more in God’s blessings than in God himself?
Exposed again.
The “package” may look so different than it did in 2006, but the lusts are still there! (Or are there — again!) I may not indulge them as often as I used to, but in so many ways the “inner me” feels like it is still in need of being transformed by the renewing of my mind. I guess it does. *I* do.
Create in me a clean heart, O God. Renew a right spirit within me…
The out-of-the-blue realization that I am blatantly something other than what I intentionally lead people to believe followed an email exchange with a dear friend…where I claimed (again) to live with integrity. I alleged that I would never do something hidden. I claimed to be authentic, genuine, what-you-see-is-what-you-get. “And durn proud of it, too…” (Toot toot toot…)
Hidden Hypocrisy…
If these things are true, then why, when Beth began to speak about “hidden hypocrisy,” did I feel so exposed? Why did I want to hide? (Hmm…a pattern emerges.)
Would I really want anyone who reads this blog, or my church friends, or my family to know me? What I am thinking? What I am…eating? Would I want any of those who “admire” me, “respect” me, who feel I am an “inspiration,” to see that the scale has nudged up in recent weeks? To know about the vacancy of my prayer life?
Hidden Hypocrisy…
And what is with ME ME ME making a You Tube video talking about the three phases of Thin Within and speaking about “discernment” and “mastery” — phase 2 and phase 3 — when I live SOLIDLY in phase 1…not just some of the time, but most of the time…without any desire to even let God change me? “God will remake your tastebuds!” Well, good grief. I sure can preach it, but there it is again…faith is seen in what I DO and what I DO says I do NOT believe what I said!
Hidden Hypocrisy…
I *have* experienced phase 2 and a bit of 3 before…and yes, I spend *some* time there now, but so often it is still my taste buds that determine what I will eat. How can I dare to speak about not being stuck? How can I encourage others when I am such a hypocrite? :-/
In fact, when it comes to my eating and drinking, I have SHUT off God’s voice of late. After a year and a half of eating “this way,” I know I can have thus and so for breakfast, this and that for lunch, and about this much of this-other-stuff for other eating occasions throughout the day, thank you very much, and still “hover” around the same weight. I have created the “Heidi Diet!” There is NO walking with the Spirit. There is NO praying. There is NO discernment. What there IS is a tuning OUT of God! What is UP with that? :-/ Pride, pride, and more pride.
I confess these things here, now, loudly. Frankly, I don’t want to put this blog entry out there…because with the coming of this realization, an old, but familiar companion has returned as well…shame. I remember well that shame breeds more shameful behavior if left unchecked. Like the blackberry brambles in my backyard, I must wage an all out assault against shame and not allow even a fragment of it to remain.
Knowing that, I reject the old way of secrecy and wallowing in shame. (Proof that God is doing a new thing! Praise YOU LORD!)
I know that shame is evidence of the enemy prowling. Like footprints on a dusty floor…footprints on the unkempt floor of my life, footprints of the enemy who is sneaking around accusing, scheming a way to devour me. I refuse to let him make any mark on my life. That is why this confession is public. I believe that in order to BE RID of this yeast, this old, fermented dough, I must choose to allow the exposing to be public, too, just as all my other claims have been public. I wish FIRST would splash this across their double page insert…:-(
Well…er…maybe not.
God, in his tenderness, chose to expose the truth in my life quietly. He is gentle that way (well, often times). He has, however, called to me to step into the light with it. He covers me — saturates me — with grace. He wraps me in a blanket. He redeems all the years the locusts have eaten. NOTHING is so great, so horrible as to stand between me and the love of God.
In fact, Psalm 3: 3,4 says:
But you are a shield around me, O LORD; you bestow glory on me and lift up my head.
To the LORD I cry aloud, and he answers me from his holy hill.
Selah
Yes, Lord. You are my shield. You bestow glory. You do not cast shame on me. You lift my head, instead. I cry to you. I thank you that You answer, Lord. I choose to “*selah,” Lord. Amen.
* Selah means pause, rest, or think about it.
** I want my dear blog reading friends to know that the above has been in process since Saturday. I have placed it here, but even so, it is an “observation.” The “correction” has begun as well. I now have a daily accountability partner. This is vital for me at this time. I celebrate that the Lord continues to do a NEW new thing! 🙂
