Warning: I’m about to get extremely vulnerable with all of you, all for the power and hope that this blog might change our lives together.
Two months ago in Lesotho a harsh reality hit me. I have been asking for healing and change, but I never expected the subject of body image to come up in my quest. The Lord brought it to my attention and it absolutely wrecked me. I came to the realization of the obsession I have in the way I look and perceiv myself. The last few years, I continued to tell myself I had it all under control, that I just needed to do XYZ and then my feelings would change and it would go away. So I will tell my story from the very beginning and I will be extremely raw, in hopes that we can tackle this issue together, for I know I am not the only human on this earth with this struggle.
MY STORY:
High school was more than difficult; it brought me to my knees. My junior year was the worst year of my life. My family broke apart and my relationships with them were failing. I was a target of scorn among my friends closest to me. I felt like the broken relationships were my fault, and I felt a great weight of blame shifted onto me. I was bullied at school and felt I was failing in everything. I was the object of ridicule for my weight at school and constantly reminded that I was bigger than the other girls. At that point in my life, an extreme amount of shame weighed heavy on me that never quite went away.
In my loss of control, my anxiety had become so bad that I could not eat without feeling sick. My stomach was constantly in knots from stress. After some time, I got used to the hunger pains. I got used to feeling that way, eventually I decided to just stop eating altogether, skipping breakfast and lunch quite regularly and hardly eating dinner. Eventually, I felt that the pain of hunger would sting far less than the pain of my present life and my situation. I began to flirt with an eating disorder, inviting a very uninviting spirit into my life. It wasn’t until a few weeks went by that my best friend noticed how thin I was beginning to look. Immediately, I began to straighten up. I had no idea my thought patterns would still continue afterward. Little did I know the shame of feeling overweight would continue to haunt me for many years to come.
College was not a cake walk, either. My situation in life was still exhausting. My weight constantly fluctuated 15 or 20 pounds because of the amount of stress all around. I felt responsible for my family’s life, the demand of a music major, and a hectic school schedule. After a year, I found freedom from preoccupation about my weight my sophomore year for the first time in my life. I finally felt comfortable in my own skin; I even felt beautiful. I felt I had finally overcome and I was happy and confident in the Lord. He blessed me by giving me the most fit body I have ever had in my life. I finally felt free.
This all came to a screeching halt after a few months went by. I was put in a humiliating and frightful situation. I allowed the enemy in and I fell back into old thought patterns centered around shame and fear. For years to come I was a mess. I gained all my weight back, despite my constant exercising. I failed again, except this time I failed AFTER I had finally succeeded. I relapsed. I continued to feel utter shame for that relapse and feel that I should have had more control over my life. So I hunkered down did the exact same things I did before the relapse and became obsessed with obtaining perfectionism in my old routine. The problem the old way was led by the Holy Spirit, the perfectionism was not.
I kept telling God “I should be better, I should have more self control, why am I a terrible and inconsistent person?” The problem? I was leading, not God. Since then, I have spent every day, every meal, and every second regretting what I eat and how much I eat. I have spent every day looking in the mirror despising what I see and judging every roll on my body, every fat particle on my round face. Nothing has ever been enough for me. Every night I would go to bed in regret and remorse toward myself, turning into a bitterness that I failed once again and nothing would ever change. I have spent years doing this while telling myself “I have this under control.” I was fine as long as I wasn’t turning back to my old habits of ignoring food altogether.
What a dirty lie.
Nobody has anything under control when they are their own object of ridicule, their own body shamer and liar. If anything, I have been more out of control when I felt “in control.” I was scared of going on the Race is for only I reason – I was afraid of not exercising anymore, I was afraid of the climbing numbers on the scale and how I may be perceived (if and when that happened). I knew I would not control what I ate and weight fluctuation was inevitable, but somehow I came on this journey anyway, though the weight was the thing I feared the most. I feared it more than leaving home and way more than going into the unknown world. I have been in a prison cell of utter pain without the freedom of breaking out of the shackles of expectation I placed on myself.
AN ARTIST’S CREATION
Fear is exactly what the enemy wants. Fear keeps you from freedom, it keeps you from appreciating what the Lord has set before you. It keeps you from who you truly are. Isaiah 64:8 states: “You, Lord are our Father. We are the clay, you are the potter; we are all the work of your hand.”
If God is a potter, He is an artist. If He is an artist, we are His sculpture. If we are His sculpture, He has spent time planning us, chiseling us with great precision and detail. He thought of who we would be since the beginning of time. If one second is 10,000 years to God, then He has had far more time than us to think through His plans thoroughly and completely. “And yet His works have been finished since the creation of the world” (Hebrews 4:3).
We are truly a work of art because He planned every detail and spent His divine years perfecting each of us. As an artist, God has a right to give law to His artwork, nobody can tell Him what He is thinking or feeling and nobody can replicate His work because it comes from such an intricate part of His heart. The potter’s bowl does not look back at his sculptor and say “You didn’t make me right. This needs to be more chiseled and this needs a better design.” How ridiculous. No critic looks at the painting of Mona Lisa and tells Mr. DaVinci that he got her face wrong and her waist should be thinner. That’s almost more ridiculous. So why do we do this to God?
God has brought to my attention that I will never truly be full in Him until I accept this haunting detail in my life. The enemy WILL attack this part of me because it questions God’s very creation. It questions His own house, the temple He has adorned His Holy Spirit to REST in. It questions the sanctity and purity of that temple and its holiness. If the purity and sanctity are questioned, than the being that desires to dwell in our temple is questioned. It questions the very dawn of time when God created man and woman and said it was good. If we can question the outside of the artist’s work, we will question the mind of the artist and his internal metaphor that was meant with every piece. We question the sanity of such a person and try to dumb him down to our own close-minded rationalism. So then we not only question the entirety of the work, but also the entirety of the artist and the uniqueness of his mind. We place the artist below us in his sanity and intellengence, because he does not think on the same level or with the same thought process as us. Therefore, in our minds the artist did not please us, so we put down the artist with ridicule and criticism. So we speak our minds and then move on. We become close-minded to what is actually beautiful and holy. So it is with our bodies and how we perceive ourselves as God’s creation. This goes far deeper than body shaming; this is also about your personality, your confidence, and your calling in life.
Ephesians 2:10 – “For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”
I CONFESSED
After keeping this to myself for a month, I finally shared my struggles with my team. I told them everything, my struggles in high school, college, and my present road block on the World Race. I discovered literally every single woman on my new team indentified with many things I was thinking and feeling. So we are tackling this together in prayer and petition, asking how to heal from this. It was amazing to me that 100% of my team identified in some way with my story and what was in my mind. God absolutely hand picked this team and I am excited to grow with them. 2 Corinthians 4:1-2 says, “Therefore, since through God’s mercy we have this ministry, we do not lose heart. Rather, we have renounced secet and shameful ways; we do not use deception, nor do we distort the word of God.
When you become unsure of who God created you to be, you become unsure of everything you are, everything you choose, and your purpose in life. This is not who we are created to be. We are meant to be free. If Jesus healed the blind, the deaf, and the lame, surely He can heal a broken heart of shame. Surely He can renew your Spirit in this process, but you must ask Him. In my next 2 blogs, I will uncover a renewing view of the body and its purpose. I will give you a prayer and advice, things that I am slowly learning. Let’s heal from this together. Let’s move forward by beginning to walk in freedom. Please pray as I post these next two blogs, that the Lord would speak through them.
I declare healing and restoration with the light inside of you will come.
With Love,
Mary Beth
