Hi, my name is Michelle Moxley and I am with Adventures in Missions. I grew up in a Christian home with amazing parents who have loved and supported me my entire life. I also went to a small Christian private school from Kindergarten to 8th grade, so I have completely grown up in the church.
Middle school was a pretty rough time for me, I was a bully to my peers and very disrespectful to almost every adult in my life. I also struggled a lot with my weight, and getting made fun of for being bigger than most people my age. Those insecurities and lies that were being told to me by those around me lead me to develop an eating disorder in 7th grade.
For over a year of my life I starved myself. I lied to those around me about eating, my mental state, and pretty much about every aspect of my life. I surrounded myself with the most negative friends and fell deeper in the lies about who I was. I truly believed that I had ruined my body and that God could no longer love me. I lost my sense of worth, and pushed away every positive and life giving aspect of my life, including my faith. I felt that God wouldn’t love me until I hit a certain weight. That I was only made in His image if I was skinny. If I looked like every other girl around me.
As I struggled through my eating disorder, I continued to grow more disrespectful to those around me, especially my parents. I fought with them constantly and lied to their faces day after day, until the punishments piled up and I was grounded for long periods of time with them watching over me constantly. This forced me to start eating again, and while I was beginning to be physically healed from my eating disorder, I wasn’t anywhere close to being mentally or spiritually healed. In the following years up until sophomore year of high school I would starve myself for a couple weeks at a time, then realizing that that wouldn’t solve anything and I would eat again, just to try to starve myself a couple months later. It was a vicious cycle that I couldn’t seem to escape, but I was so filled with shame that I refused to tell anyone.
Sophomore year of high school everything changed. I began to grow closer to an amazing friend who started to show me what it looked like to love myself. She brought (and still brings) out the best in me, and began the slow walk to recovery with me. I also began to get more involved in my church youth group and started to understand what it means to have a real relationship with the Lord. As I began to grow in my faith, God slowly began showing me who I am in Him. Over these past 3 years I have learned and found so much truth in my identity as a Child of God. I am loved. I am chosen. I am wanted. I am made perfectly in His image. There is nothing I can do to earn, or lose His overwhelming, perfect love. And I am free from the chains of my eating disorder. I am free.
I still struggle daily to believe these truths. It is a choice that I have to make every day to not find identity in how I eat or what I look like, but believe that I am loved and made perfectly. While it is getting to much easier to enjoy small things like eating chips without looking at the calorie count, my struggle with food will always be with me. But so will the Lord, and He is so much more powerful than my eating disorder. And He will remind me 100 times a day that I am chosen and a daughter of the King. And THAT identity is the only one that matters.
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The church my team and I are partnering with had a small women’s retreat this past Saturday and I had the opportunity to share my this, my real testimony, for a group of about 80 women. I say ‘real’ because this was the first time that I have ever been completely vulnerable in my testimony and talked about my eating disorder.
I have lived behind the shame of doubting God’s love for me for years. I have ignored the Spirit’s promptings to share my story with everyone around me for as long as I can remember. I put up the facade of having lived a ‘perfect’ Christian life for almost every person in my life. I thought that if they knew that I had mistreated the body God gave me that I would be judged. I believed the Devil’s lie that I was alone in the struggle and that everyone else believed that they were perfectly made and loved who they were.
When my team and my leadership staff asked me how it felt to share my testimony for the first time, the only word that I could think of was ‘freeing’. I have never felt so vulnerable, yet felt so loved at the same time, and it was amazing. I was blown away by the positive responses I received from those women, and as soon as I finished I knew that I could no longer hide behind the facade that I had put up for everyone else in my life.
So here is my real testimony. With all my doubt, imperfections, failures, and above all, my newfound freedom.
