The Joy of Sanctification

I was at Walmart a few weeks ago and Melissa (my daughter) called me on my cell to ask if I would buy a scale (we haven't had one since I threw our other one away after I weighed in at the doctor and saw that I was about 6 lbs heavier than my scale showed). So I bought it (regretfully). I was surprised, when I stepped on it, to find that I was at 150 lbs! I don't think I even reached 150 lbs with any of my pregnancies. Maybe with Angela, but I was back down to 110 by the time she was 6 mos.

I've been very tempted these last few weeks to go on the non weight-gaining $50/month medication simply because I’m not sure if, (since I went off the medicine for a few months and went back on again) I will continue gaining more and more weight. I kind of peaked at about 146 when I was on it before and the fact that I started gaining again is a bit scary. But I did some internet research on the new medicine and don't like what I saw people post about it’s side effects at all. So after praying that God would give me some sort of sign to assure me that I could go on this new medication (it‘s only 2-3 months on the market), he scared me away from it. lol

He is working mightily through all of this. Sanctifying me. I know this may sound foreign to anyone who has not battled with a poor self-image, or should I say, anyone who hasn’t lived their life believing that their total self-worth was tied up in how they look (although having self-worth tied up in job or friends or anything other than God isn't any better). Yet at times I feel embarrassed to even write this kind of stuff in my blog. Sometimes I feel like maybe it's just me. But I know that's not true. I can see, even in my own daughters, the effects of a culture that is screaming everywhere, to girls, that beauty is everything. I grew up with it.

I am so grateful to God for this trial. I am learning to really believe that my body is not me. It does not define me or my value. I have a long way to go for sure, but I am seeing changes in my thinking. When I first began putting on weight and up until very recently in-fact, I felt as though I were hovering between two resting places. On one side, I saw rest with God….a looking away from self to Him and finding my peace and confidence in Him. And on the other side I saw a very comfortable and familiar rest with self….an obsessive looking to self, (my body, my looks) and desiring so strongly to pour myself into that (knocking myself out exercising and dieting to lose weight) so that I could find peace and confidence in me. I felt torn between these two (I actually still do sometimes). My flesh wanted to continue the well-trodden path I’d been on, but I knew that there was no real peace and rest there at all, and so I strongly desired to be where I knew I'd find true rest.

The problem was that I couldn’t (for quite awhile) rest in either place. Every time I tried to turn my focus to self for peace, I felt the hand of God moving it away. (Examples: Allowing *ordaining* ailments that caused me to go on the meds in the first place/ Causing a recurrence of pain after I went off the meds so I had to go back on/Closing doors to try other medications/A general feeling of prodding by God to not turn to self…even an inability to rest there I‘d say). Yet, when I tried to get to the side where my true peace and rest could be found, I just didn’t know how to get there. I couldn’t make myself stop feeling like I had to prove my self worth by losing the weight. This sort of “rest” was so ingrained in me. But over time, through prayerful pleadings that God would help me to rest in Him instead of self, and quoting the truth (Scripture) to counteract the lies (the flesh, the culture, Satan), I feel like I have made much progress toward resting in Him, and who I am in Him, instead of what I look like in this body. I’m not saying the struggle is over. But I am hopeful and joyful as I continue to move closer to true rest in God and further from false rest in self.