Okay, God.  I get it.  You give me insight and you expect me to act on it.  If I don’t, then you arrange my circumstances to reinforce your point.

I have struggled with food and body issues since I was 16.  I finally reached close to the weight I feel best at (more or less –don’t we always want to be thinner?)  I bought a scale to weigh myself every day.  If the scale showed close to my ideal, it was a good day.  In fact, my first thoughts of the day would come from what the scale showed.  And God made it very clear that this was wrong.  He gently, but persistently would ask me (the thoughts would come into my head): “Is that what is most important to you?  Your body which is temporary and is going to get old and wrinkled and break down – is that what determines how you feel about life?   What about the fact that I died for you, that I have given you eternal life, you who didn’t deserve it, you who deserve condemnation?  Do you really value your body more than what I have given you?”

And I would say, “I know you’re right – I’m to love you and worship you above all else.  But this scale has the power to determine what kind of day I’ll have.  And even though if I don’t like the number, I’ll be depressed, there’s a chance the number is on the thin side and I’ll feel REALLY good!”

But, recently, the scales have been going up and up and I seem to have no control over the number it shows or over my body.  I haven’t changed my exercise or my eating habits.  For the days when I’ve eaten more, I’ve compensated.  But now I am perplexed and have been depressed.

Yet I understand what has happened.  When I wasn’t obedient to the soft God-voice, He had to get my attention in a stronger fashion.  Repenting, I put away the scales today and asked God to give me a different way of thinking.  And He did.  I was in Zechariah this morning.  Chapter 4, verse 6 says:  Not by might, not by strength but by my spirit alone, says the Lord. And then in an email Christian quote of the day, was Paul’s reminder to Timothy (and to us) that God has not given us a spirit of fear (or condemnation) but a spirit of love, of power and of a sound mind (the Holy Spirit).

So, dear Lord, forgive me for looking to something other than You as my lodestar.  Guide me this day in how to think (and how to eat). I can’t be trusted to think correctly on my own.   I’m fallen.  And thinking right thoughts IS our chief moral duty (per Michael Novak, a Catholic theologian).  For unless we think correctly and truthfully about God, we will not act properly.