What God commands – impossible!

May 28, 2017

Maria 1 Kings 8, 1 Peter 5, Control, Food, Husbands, Idols, Pain, Psalm 119, Psalm 84, Sin, Slavery , , , , , , Leave a comment

May he turn our hearts to him, to walk in obedience to him and keep the commands, decrees and laws he gave our ancestors. 1 Kings 8:58 (NIV)

I incline my heart to perform your statutes forever, to the end.  Psalm 119:112 (ESV)

I argued ALL day long!  Conversing with God throughout the hours, using Gospel logic. And at the end of the day, I was exhausted and still miserable and STUCK!

What was the matter?  Nothing more than not being happy with a number on a scale.

You’d say that my battle with the idol of the scales and an arbitrary weight I have self-assigned is IRRATIONAL.  And you’re right.  But I can’t seem to respond to unbiased logic.

The two-day battle took place on a Monday and a Wednesday (the one-day reprieve provided some emotional rest).

What made things worse was seeing that appealing to God’s promises and statements of Biblical fact did not appear to help.  In times of suffering, my go-to verses are these verses that I have personalized:

  • No good thing do you withhold, Lord, because I belong to you. – Ps 84:11
  • I know you do ALL things well, Jesus. Mark 7:37

Between affirming those truths, I tried to OBEY him.  Repeatedly I cast THIS care onto Him.  (1 Peter 5:7) But when no emotional or spiritual relief came, I concluded ‘it hadn’t worked’ and told my Father again, “Look, I’m casting this on you.  Help me!  I’m trying to do what you ask!”

I finally told my husband what I was struggling with, sheepish and ashamed, because we’ve been married 37 years. He has listened to me many a night pour out the same grief and pain.

Besides sharing a powerful insight that maybe this ‘thorn’ is a permanent gift from God, meant to drive me even closer to him, he offered this advice:

Maria, you can’t even begin to do what God commands, such as handing this issue over to him.  He has to help you even with this!  In fact YOUR acknowledged helplessness and powerlessness is what God wants from you, not your obedience.  He knows you are incapable of obeying.

Further tender counseling on his part revealed that I have a ways to go to think rightly about this burden.  Mike pointed out that I’ve been living and functioning as though eating and my body-care were something I could manage or control.  I realize this is a lie, an illusion that I have WANTED to believe. What betrays me is how often my prayers have been:

  • God, Father, just show me HOW to eat and WHAT to eat so I can be done with this.  I’m sick of focusing on me.  I want to be free of thinking about me.

A young friend shared recently how her days are REALLY hard and painful. She’s a young wife with a baby.  Continually she cries out to God for help.  But he doesn’t seem to respond.

Her experience and mine find company in the Psalms.  Some of those dark, hope-less accounts of David and Heman, one of his musicians, don’t end with cheer and relief from God.  Read Psalm 88, all of it.  Here are just two verses:

13  But I, O LORD, cry to you;

in the morning my prayer comes before you.

14  O LORD, why do you cast my soul away?

Why do you hide your face from me?

What I’m concluding is that God DOES care.  And if He isn’t answering me in the way I expect him too, it’s because he’s still up to something good in my life.  The story is not over yet.  I just thought that BY NOW, I’d have put THIS struggle to bed.

One byproduct of this misery is this:  I find that I am far more compassionate with some of the ongoing patterns of sin and pain other struggle with, especially the kind we bring on ourselves!

But I’m tired.

What about you? Do you feel saddled, still, with the ‘same ole, same ole’ sin?  What has helped you?

 

One-year anniversary of freedom

December 5, 2016

Maria Freedom, Holy Spirit, John 8, Prayer, Unbelief , , , , 1 Comment

Scales in bathroom

It was a year ago today, 5 December 2015 that I walked away from my self-imposed dungeon sentence of measuring my worth by what I weigh.  I had lived in that dark and despair-filled place since my junior year in high school. And I’m almost 60!

But after MANY years of pain and many attempts to free myself, God gave me the courage to let the scales and a number go.

I have felt SO free this year.  No more early morning self-condemnation.

Instead, I TRY to measure my day by pleasing Him.  How?

  • by relying on His Spirit to do every task in the day.

Do I forget?  Yes, but encouragement from other Christians retools my focus. Just last week a gal wrote about battling unbelief.  The takeaway for me from her article was this:

Each hour I DON’T pray, I’m saying to God:  “I got this next hour, God.  I don’t need your help!”

John 8:36 – So if the Son sets you free, you are truly free

God always has the better answer

June 30, 2015

Maria Colossians, Devotional Bites, Holy Spirit, Prayer, Sanctification , , , , , , 1 Comment

Blog - Scales

“To weigh or not to weigh?”

I didn’t for 2 mornings. Freedom.

Morning came. And the tempter had whispered right before bed: “What’s your reward for any restraint in the evening if not for the potential measure of success the next morning?”

Wish I hadn’t listened. Result? Self-absorbed.

Confessed to God. Repented.

Looked up at “Christ ..in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” Col 2:3

Gave ‘it’ to God to tell me what to do.

The answer came via 16th century pastor William Gurnall. The Holy Spirit nailed me. Turns out I’m a liar! I had prayed this morning, “Your will be done in my life, Lord!”

And ignored that His will for my life is my sanctification, growing Jesus-like, not weighing X or Y.

What makes you happy is a clue to who you are

March 15, 2015

Maria Happiness, Idols, James 4, Joy, Luke 18, Matthew 16, Psalm 16, Worship , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Matthew 16:26 – What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul?

“I need to get an A on my Psych test this week!”

  • Why?

“It’ll make me happy!”

  • Why?

“If I do well in my major, then I can get into a good grad program.”

  • Why do you want that?

“So I can have a career as a clinical psychologist”

  • Why?

“I think I’ll be happy in that profession and find it rewarding!”

  • Why?

“When I was a child, my family and I were greatly helped through some sessions with a counselor.  I think that I’d be happy assisting people the same way.”

The pastor who shared this scenario did not go any deeper with his questioning of the college student.  But had he probed closer, a possible subsequent question might have been:

  • Why does it make you happy to help people?

I think the truthful answer to that question is key to revealing the source of our hope, joy, value, identity, purpose – in a word, our VERY essence.

Here is why it matters.  If our hope, our happiness-source is anything but Jesus, we have engaged in a DOOMED quest for 2 reasons:

1) we’ll never be satisfied the way we are wired to be

2) we can lose THAT which we might gain

This reality came to a head for me on Friday.  I started my day at 4:20 am with my ritual worship at the alter of MY WEIGHT, aka the bathroom scale.  Talk about God’s sovereignty – He controls my body to such a degree for His good purposes, that just like previous days and weeks, I was stuck 5 pounds higher than I want to be…..a fact painful to me since November when I realized that I had added to Maria’s substance.

I KNEW that this moment was crucial, that I was battling idolatry and who and what was most important in my life.  I wrestled with this truth on my morning walk, recognizing the approaching ‘line in the sand’.

Line in the sand

Was I going to worship MY happiness or submit to God as Lord of my life?

So once again, I decided to abandon this morning ritual. (I don’t need the scales to help me eat in the manner that provides me with the most energy – we’re talking about something SICK in my soul, an obsession with the scales and a numeral!)  This time, I pray, the decision stays final.  (cynics or realists might rightly ask, “Where have I heard THAT resolve before?!”

Listening to John Piper’s sermon in the car on the way to school and applying his line of probative questions to what I describe as that which makes me happy, I saw the foolishness and futility of imbuing 5 pounds with THAT much power over me.

For MY bottom line with the weight idol is this: If I weigh X lbs, I’ll be happy.

That’s stupid!  Our lives are just a vapor,

As James says in chapter 4, verse 4- ….You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.

Why should you or I allocate that many resources of mind, heart and strength to the shell, the temporary? Where is my concern with the main part of me that will last eon upon eon of time?  And if, as the Bible teaches, we are going to be completely changed upon seeing Jesus face to face, why am I angsting over what will drop off and decay?

As our pastor Patrick quipped this morning: When we die, the nut that we were leaves behind the withered shell of our body. (That got me pondering: Am I a peanut, a chestnut, a walnut, a pistachio????)   I’m 57 years old.  This weight issue is OH,SO temporary and 40 years from now I won’t be even thinking about it.  So why waste my earthly energy TODAY worshipping the outer casing that is going to disintegrate?

Back to the title of this reflection:

Who are you?  Who am I?  Are we our own god?  or are we worshippers and lovers of the only true and living God?  Truth is – we have souls. We were created and wired only to be satisfied by the best – God, Himself.  Why waste our happiness on junk when we can experience a partial joy NOW learning about and savoring God, all along knowing that ‘fullness of joy‘ awaits us. (Psalm 16:11)

PS:  One final thought about the student who might have answered that her idea of happiness was helping others.  If we help others to FEEL good about ourselves, that is sin.  If we help others to PLEASE our heavenly Father and do that work in His strength, honoring Him in the process, that is what the Bible calls ‘good’.  Inner motivation DOES matter. The Pharisees sought man’s approval and esteem through outward ‘righteous’ behavior.  (Read again Jesus’ words in Luke 18:9-14)

 

The Christian, freedom and failures

December 7, 2014

Maria 1 Corinthians, 1 Peter, Doubt, Faith, Freedom, God's Sovereignty, Idols, Law, Obedience, Prayer, Promises, Romans, Soul growth, Worries , , , , , , 4 Comments

My school is one of those progressive institutions.  As such, they have embraced the concept of Failure as something positive.  Picking and choosing practices from other educational models throughout the country, our school leaders have sought to implement a healthier ethos.  The rehabilitation of Failure is part of current changes. Apparently, girls have historically viewed Failure as the dreaded ‘F Word‘.

But thanks to Tavis Smiley, talk show host and author of a 2011 book on learning from mistakes, a way to assess flops has reached even our grade-school girls.

Fail up

Teachers at my school tweaked Smiley’s catchy phrase: ‘Fail Up! to create the moniker ‘Fail Forward‘ as a way to encourage our students NOT to be discouraged when at first they don’t succeed. After a few months of hearing their teachers preach the benefits of failing forward (aka, learning from one’s mistakes) this phrase now quite easily rolls off the tongues of our grade-school girls.

That entire preamble to set the stage for my recent failure to stick to a decision I had made for the 5th? time in my life and announced to those who read this blog.  I had resolved NOT to feed the idol/slave driver of the bathroom scale.  I carried through for 5 weeks, feeling ‘free’, once I broke my morning habit.  And for a while I thoroughly enjoyed NOT having my status beat me up at ‘0 dark30‘ each new day!

Then one morning, suspecting that I was gaining weight, I stepped on the scale. Did I talk first to God or even reason through the possible consequences?  Didn’t even cross my mind!

To my dismay, I found that in 5 weeks I had added more Maria to the planet!

Spiritual warfare broke out with an explosive roar as God allowed my trust in His goodness to be evaluated.   The test (….ultimately designed to strengthen my faith) boiled down to this:

  • Was I going to employ my only offensive weapon (God’s Word of Truth), specifically His promise that I had been meditating on and ‘preaching’ to my husband?

1 Peter 5:7 – Cast all your anxieties on Him, for He cares for you

Sword fight

 

 

 

Did I really believe that even THIS problem/burden was something He could and would take care of for me, if I heaved it into His lap and left it there?  The torturing dilemma was this:

  • What am I going to do, now that I’m gaining weight?
  • Yet I also desire NOT to be enslaved to the scale!
  • How am I going to eat?
  • How am I supposed to think about food, my body, the scale and ALL that?

I wrestled with my unbelief, confessing and repenting multiple times as my mind darted back to THE BURDEN.

But God…..(wonderful, life-giving words of hope) gently through a persistent hint of possible resolution and peace, brought to mind a plan to cut back just a little each day.  And to weigh ONCE a week to verify if this change might work. I would reassess WITH Him once enough weeks had gone by.

Furthermore, through listening to the quadriplegic Joni Eareckson Tada’s reflections on thanking God in the midst of her pain and severe limitations, I was reminded to thank my heavenly Father for strong legs, health and a clear mind.

I immediately wrote out a prayer asking God to give me both the desire AND the strength to follow through, in total reliance on Him.  That was a week ago.

The battle has been fierce at times, revolving around the fundamental issue of trust and gratitude.   At times I’ve entertained the idea of just hopping on that ‘evaluator’ THIS morning.  After all, the temptation is not to do something morally wrong or explicitly condemned in the Bible.

But God…..at those moments has sovereignly and lovingly directed a devotional or segment of His Word to address:

  • my lack of belief in His promises
  • my disobedience
  • and the sin of doing something NOT for the glory of God

(1 Cor 10:31 So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God)

Yesterday was Saturday – my first ‘weigh-in day’ since this battle broke out again.

Drum roll

I was down 2 tenths of one pound.  (thank you, Lord, for this evidence of your grace).

To encourage me, I also ‘stumbled‘ upon my new favorite verse: 1 Corinthians 6:12

The French wording of this verse feels more personal and is easy for me to grasp, so I’ll quote you that, together with the direct translation of those words:

This is the Apostle Paul reminding us, his Christian sisters and brothers, of the freedom we have in union with Christ:

  • Tout m’est permis.  Everything is permitted me
  • Certes, mais tout n’est pas bon pour moi. For sure, but everything is not good for me.
  • Tout m’est permis, c’est vrai.  Everything is permitted me, that’s true.
  • Mais, je ne veux pas me placer sous un esclavage quelconque.  But I don’t want to put myself under any version of slavery!

Whether my past two weeks is an example of ‘failing forward’ as my school sees it, I know one thing for sure! (Certes!):

  • for Christians, God promises to work ALL things together for our good, as part of His plan and purpose to conform us to be like our older Brother, Jesus.

 

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