I was a freshman in high school the first time I
tried making myself throw up. I was determined to be the next Carrie Bradshaw, and convinced myself
that I needed to be 20 pounds skinner in order to even scratch the surface of being fabulous. So
I spent a whole Saturday afternoon leaned over the toilet, sticking all sorts
of objects down my throat in a desperate attempt to become bulimic until my
eyes watered from the hard chokes of the mere acid that I purged. When I
realized God must have built in some supercharged anti-gag reflex that resisted
the powers of fingers, chopsticks, and pens, I Googled guides on how to throw
up, trying to figure out if it was worth it to drink ipecac, since I didn't
want to kill myself, but only give myself an eating disorder. After three more
weeks of trying, I gave up, resigned to the fact that some angel from Heaven
must have had his hands placed down my stomach to save me from myself.
Six years later, I'm 14 again. After a close
guy friend implied that I needed to lose weight winter quarter, I saw clearly
what I had been denying the past year by avoiding mirrors, and spiraled out of
control. How could either of us have known what would follow: that what had
sprung from good intentions would lead me back to square one. I started
counting calories like an obsession, looking up and logging every single thing
I ate, and then forcing myself to go to sleep starving so that I wouldn't go
over my daily limit. When that stopped working, I started going to the gym
three times a day, in the morning right when I woke up, in between classes so
that I wouldn't eat lunch, and then again at 11pm, to make sure I zeroed out my
calories before I went to bed. At night, I would lie awake, grabbing the fat
around my stomach wishing I could somehow claw it away with my nails so that I could stop
needing to cover it with big sweaters. When I would finally fall asleep, I
would be haunted by nightmares of running away and trying to hide my body from
people I used to know when I was skinnier, or hearing people I didn't even
recognize call me a "fat-ass." I would wake up with that word
pounding in my head, reminding myself that I was a failure and shaming me from
even talking to people. The few times I would actually let myself go out
to meet new people, I would subconsciously grab my throat, hoping they wouldn't
notice the layers of fat that would form around my chin whenever I
laughed.
And this is how sin entangles you. It doesn't
even look like sin from the outside. It looks like something permissible,
beneficial even. You're convinced it's containable, that you have it under
control, until you don't. It looks like a little girl screaming and laughing as
she runs in and out of the ocean. She starts at the edge, where the tide first
hits the sand, where the water tickles her feet and it feels cool. She
hesitantly walks in a little deeper and runs back out giggling when the water
hits her knees. Then she's hiking up her dress, afraid to get it wet, and walks
to where the water will now cover her bare legs. It's harder to run out now,
but she can still do it, and challenges herself to go in once more, this
time the last time, this time just a little deeper than before, and the water
hits her faster than she predicted, the water is higher than she remembered,
and it overtakes her until she's drowning, gasping for air, her soaking dress
pulling her down while the waves crash over her.
In the same way, my sin never looked like sin
from the beginning. It looked health, it looked like fitness, it looked like
being a good steward of my body. But when counting calories wasn't enough, I
went in deeper. When working out wasn't enough, I went in even deeper, still
convinced I was so close to dry land. And when that wasn't enough, I was back
to 14 years old, leaning over a toilet, trying desperately to make myself throw
up after each meal, drowning in my own fear of being a failure while failing at
even throwing up.
I grew bitter at God, bitter that He had
designed me to look the way I did and designed me so that I couldn't just go to
bulimia as a quick-fix for my problem. I stopped going to church and large
group regularly, and stopped praying entirely. So I closed my eyes and let
myself drown, falling deeper and deeper into unknown territory, until I
couldn't even remember what it was like to not wake up in the morning looking
up pictures of models and then mentally go through what I was allowed to eat
that day and what I would have to do at the gym by the end of the night.
I didn't realize how bad it had gotten until my
old small group leader Renee visited one day, and handed us back letters we had
written to ourselves a year ago. I suddenly remembered every single thing I had
written without even opening the letter, all the hopes and dreams I had as a
freshman who had experienced firsthand the transforming power of Christ's love
and was now ready to take on the world, or at least my piece of it, for Christ.
I remembered looking forward to passionately sharing the gospel and growing in
my relationship with God my sophomore year, and even small group leading my
junior year. But at that moment, at the end of what I had imagined would be a
fruitful sophomore year, I was just as pathetic as I was when I was a freshman
in high school, worshipping Seventeen magazine and Jessica Alba's body and
thinking that was life. I could now do 50 push-ups and run 10Ks, but I was
miserable, lonely, ashamed, worn out, and so, so far from God. I truly had
nothing to show for.
I gave myself the deadline of May 3rd on my 20th
birthday to humble myself, repent, and come back to God. Two days after my
birthday, I prayed honestly for the first time in months and admitted to God I
couldn’t make it in this world without Him. I felt stupid, not knowing how to
say how alone I felt, and then just saying aloud “I feel alone.” I felt like I was
talking to a wall, probably because I was literally facing a wall when I was
praying, but it felt stupid. And I think I imagined that God would send down some
fiery thunderbolt and zap my heart and I would feel this electric shock
throughout my body and feel instantly holy and loved and at peace, and never
ever ever again want to count calories or go to the gym ever again. But it
didn’t work like that. Monday morning came, I got dressed to go to the gym,
worked out, showered and changed into a new set of gym clothes, and prepared to go
the gym again later that night. I ate lunch, and counted my calories, and went
on the Women’s Health Magazine website to look up new workouts, like I always
did on Mondays. By the time I got to dinner, I realized my day had looked exactly
like it did the Monday, Wednesday and Friday the week before, and that nothing
had changed. But I hadn’t wanted it to. I wanted to be on good terms with God
but still hold on to my lifestyle and my attitude and my habits. So a very wise
discipler held me accountable against my will so that I wouldn’t go to the gym
again at night.
The
next day I repented again, and waited for the thunderbolt of self-acceptance to
zap me and make me never ever ever want to count calories or go to the gym
again. When that didn’t happen, I repented again the next day and the day after
that, until I realized I had probably mixed up the God of Greek mythology,
Josephine’s imagination, and the Bible somewhere up in my mind. So I patiently
waited on the Lord, not exactly knowing what to expect.
The
change wasn’t overnight, but slowly and surely, my heart changed. I stopped
weighing myself every morning, and stopped going to the gym three times a day,
until it was done to two, and then down to one, until two Wednesdays ago, the
first weekday all quarter, I didn’t go to the gym at all. I started allowing
myself to have dessert every once in a while without beating myself up about it
later, and to actually laugh without holding my throat. I started to enjoy the
fellowship that God had graced me with, and realized how much I had missed
being a part of the body of Christ. I started to view my inability to be bulimic as a blessing rather than a curse, and the Christians who had held my hand every step of the way as the true angels that had saved me from myself. Most importantly, I enjoyed His
presence and Him alone.
Chris
Gee asked this morning at Crossroads, “How much more do you need to be 100%
satisfied?” Someone had asked me this same question a few months ago about how
much more weight I needed to lose before I was satisfied. I said just a little
more. But we both knew I was lying. I would not have been satisfied if I had
lost five pounds more, ten pounds more, or even twenty pounds more. Even when I
was twenty pounds lighter two years ago coming in as a freshman, I remember eating
raw broccoli for dinner, even when I was already a size 0, but striving to be still
skinnier.
I
tried walking away from Christ because I was convinced I had found something
better but couldn’t. I invested my time in something else and wasted it. I
poured my heart in the things of this world and broke it. I wanted more, just a
little more, but it wasn’t enough, and could never have been enough. I know now that only Christ will be enough,
so enough is enough.
I
don’t know if I’ll ever be at a point where I can stop mentally counting calories
before I eat, or if I’ll ever completely accept what I see in the mirror, but
one thing I do know, “forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies
ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in
Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 3:13-14)
My
end was destruction, my god was my body, and my glory in my shame, with my mind
set on earthly things. “But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await
a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like
his glorious body, by the power that enables even to subject all things to
himself.” (Philippians 3:19-21)
So
I end with this, I cry with the same cry for God that David prayed in the
desert:
"O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you;
So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary,
Because your steadfast love is better than life,
So I will bless you as long as I live;
My soul will be satisfied as with fat and rich food,
when I remember you upon my bed,
for you have been my help,
My soul clings to you;
-Psalm 63: 1-8
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