Reality Check--Who's to Blame?

As I stated before, this journey to weight loss has been a long road:  9 years to be exact.  And let me tell you, it has been a battle.  God had to take me down a path of figuring some things out, to finally beat this once and for all.  Growing up I was constantly surrounded by obesity.  Everyone in my family was over-weight, and I used that as justification for my own situation.  I didn't want to take responsibility for my weight.  It was easier to use my DNA as an excuse.  I was willing to believe I would always remain heavy.  Fast forward years later.  I was getting married.  I had actually lost a lot of my weight.  About 75 pounds, and I was so happy.  And my family had lost a lot of their weight.  But then I got comfortable.  I lost all of my discipline, and was content to no longer work at it.  And I slowly began putting the weight back on.  7 months after being married, my life changed drastically.  We left everything we knew behind and hit the road to raise our support to get to the Philippines.  As a coping mechanism to deal with my ever changing surroundings, I turned to the one thing that could be my constant--my love of food.  And before I knew it I was back to 220.  I was finally at my last straw and I begged God for help.

You are not alone in this.  I've been where you are and I know the struggles you are going through.  You can even go back to the beginning of this blog and read about the obstacles and hardships I've faced to get where I am today.  There is nothing magical about it, no quick and easy fixes.  Just a lot of hard work.  But the key for me taking those initial steps to change required me to get to the root of the problem; it was a heart issue.  I want to share what God taught me that has enabled me to change.

This post is about examining our inward selves as we reflect on what's going on on the outside.  As a Christian I have to believe that everything that is "wrong" with us is a spiritual issue.  People are always seeking an answer for why they are the way they are.  Wondering how they got to be that way.  I don't think we need psychologists to tell us what happened to us and where to go from here...I think we need to look to the Scriptures and see what it has to say.  Our spiritual and physical lives are so intertwined. We can't separate them.

So that brings us to the question, is being overweight or obese a sin?

I think we've lost the seriousness of our sin.  We hate the word, and with good reason.  Overcoming sin is hard but we have to face it head-on to win the battle.  No more justifications, no more excuses, no more blame-shifting and finger-pointing.  Any time we fail to practice self-control and discipline in ANY area of our lives (eating included), then we are allowing that thing to steal our focus from God and become an idol.  And that is a sin.

But Christ beckons us to be different.  He challenges us to make Him #1 in our lives.   He doesn't leave us where we are.  He looks upon us with grace and mercy and calls for change.

I like the way my husband Jordan talked about resolutions on his blog.  Here's a snippit from his post Lessons from the Dentist's Chair (Part 3).

This is a time of resolutions for change.  Yet most of these resolutions will be abandoned by the end of the month.  Why?  Because the change is “too hard” or “too painful” and people just give up.  Or they refuse to set solid goals because they are afraid of failure and in so doing, set themselves up to fail anyways.  It is an annual cycle of mediocrity.

Spiritually speaking, we all have sin we allow to persist in our lives.  Time and time again we may try to tackle it on our own, but ultimately the pain of change is too much, or we justify it away so change is no longer needed. (And let’s be honest, most of those New Year’s Resolutions, at their core, are addressing a “minor” sin issue that we refuse to acknowledge as such and relinquish.)  Sin has a tendency of putting its roots in deep, and the longer we fail to address it, the more painful the process of removing it becomes.

The old cliché says “No pain, no gain.”  It is a cliché for a reason:  there is truth in it.  God is working to remove the offensive and destructive habits that have formed in our lives through His discipline and sanctification.  I can promise you this:  there will ALWAYS be pain involved in that process, but it is also ALWAYS worth it!  Somewhere along the line we became spiritual wimps, too comfortable for our own good, with greatly diminished pain thresholds.  We need to realize that with God, the pay-off is ALWAYS worth the price paid.  I can’t really word it any better than the author of Hebrews, who had much to say on this topic:  No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful.  Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.

The good news is, we don't have to stay the same.  There can be victory!

Romans 6:5-7 (New International Version, ©2010)

⁵ For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly also be united with him in a resurrection like his. ⁶ For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body ruled by sin might be done away with,^[a] that we should no longer be slaves to sin— ⁷ because anyone who has died has been set free from sin.

If we believe in Him, then we are free!  YOU CAN BE FREE!  Free to be the person He created you to be.

But you have to take ownership.  You have to admit there is a problem.  You have to acknowledge where you are, before you can make a plan for where you're going.  

 It's time to face the music.

Time to take a long, hard look in the mirror.

I did and I am so grateful for where I am today because of it.