“And going a little farther he fell on his face and prayed, saying, “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will.” (Matthew 26: 39)
When it comes to praying, I’m no expert. Actually, I’m sub-par at best. Of the many questions I have on prayer, there has always been one, specifically, burning in my mind; “How do you pray with the faith God says we can have, yet also know it may not be in God’s will?” When healing doesn’t come and the battle you face is indefinitely exhausting how do you pray? Where does this amazing faith come from?
In my first post I touched on the topic of identity. This appears to be an underlining theme for me so I’m going to be painfully real about it here, if you’re already bored of this topic you are free to peace out at any time. I bought into a lie a lengthy time ago, one I’ve recently realized I’ve still been feeding all these years. Something I also touched on in my first post was my struggle with an eating disorder (affectionately dubbed ED) in my younger teen years. I believe this was the start of my desperate search for identity.
When I was a little younger than thirteen, I guess you could say I became aware of my body and myself more than I had before. At first it was just personality stuff; trying to fit in, worrying that I was either too much or not enough, or if people really liked me. As some time passed, I began to experience a deep sadness that no part of me could explain. At times I felt like I had crawled into a black hole where the ground was made of loneliness and the walls molded by darkness. In this hole I felt stuck and had no explanation for why. My life felt out of control, but you wouldn’t have guessed it from the outside looking in. I had a nice Christian family, my parents took us to church three times a week, I was home-schooled, grades were good, and I had friends; I should have been fine. But I was choking on the darkness, starved for some sort of control. I thought I had found it when I found ED.
Everything about it was enticing: I could look better, be better than my sister at something, control what went into my body, and feel better about myself all by simply not eating. because, hey, if I couldn’t change Jennifer, I could at least change her body. I gorged myself on the lies that ED would tell me day in and day out. These consisted of phrases such as, "you're not good enough and never will be without me." "Your'e as fats as a cow and so disgusting." "You have no self control." "No one will like you unless you loose weight." At first, it was just skipping breakfast, but this gave me such a rush and sense of power, that I knew I knew I could try harder. Every waking moment was spent analyzing how much I had eaten that day, how much exercise I needed to do to make up for that food, and how I was going to hide my food. Sleep was the only thing I looked forward to because of the exhaustion day brought. Not eating was like a drug, each time I had to eat less to get the same high. I didn’t and couldn’t care about anything or anyone else because I felt nothing else. Anorexia doesn't simply startle your body, it wastes away at your mind, your spirit, and your heart. My mind was bent on not gaining weight, it was the only thing that mattered. I would have rather died before becoming “fat" again.
“How do you pray with the faith God says we can have, yet also know it may not be in God’s will? When healing doesn’t come and the battle you face is indefinitely exhausting how do you pray? Where does this amazing faith come from?"
My parents soon recognized what was happening, I was sick, yes, but not in the way they had originally thought. My mind was sick, and I was beyond the point of helping myself. They told me I was going to see a therapist, and I hated them for it as I desperately tried to explain to them that I was just becoming “healthier”. Fast-forward two months, two dietitians, multiple therapy sessions, more Ensure than any human should have to pretend to drink, and I was fed up and exhausted to the bone (no pun intended). All these lies I had been feasting on left me weaker than I could have ever imagined. I finally agreed to go to treatment and soon I was on my way to Indiana for a little over two months.
That time in treatment left me no longer feeling like a seventeen-year-old, but, rather, a small child. My broken body was merely a shadow of my broken spirit, trying to understand what feelings were. You could find me curled in a ball of fear and terrified of everything, especially myself. Treatment was one of the most painful fears I’ve ever faced in my life, but it wasn’t all roses and sunshine when I got out. Lies have a funny way of rooting themselves in you and it takes more than a couple of months to pull the weeds out. Intensive outpatient treatment, dietitian meetings, and group therapy was what it took to fight the weeds that kept trying to choke me out. When I thought I was over all of it I found myself in a relapse my senior year of high school and went through the worst depression since the beginning of it all. There were days when I would bawl my eyes out on the kitchen floor, the idea of me going out in public where people would have to look at my ugly self, horrifying me.
I owned up to the relapse before it got too serious and kept clawing at the weeds of lies while also trying to replant truth into my heart. The pesky thing about weeds though is they like to pop up unexpectedly, some are easy to pull, other go so deep you have to dig them up, and there’s always more. At age thirteen I began to believe a lie: I’m not enough. I would like to say that I have been starving that lie but, in all honesty, I find myself going back and nibbling on it from time to time. Sometimes I bite off more than I can chew and I start to crave it again.
"All these lies I had been feasting on left me weaker than I could have ever imagined."
I would like to stand here and tell you that mental struggles are a thing of the past. Body image? That was so two years ago. Depression? Well I conquered that back in high school. Food abuse? I just like food OK. People pleasing? Who gives a rip what other people think, I’m a strong independent woman. Loneliness? I have plenty of people around me. Emotional pain? I’m not emotional, in fact I hate crying. Self-Hate? That’s a thing from my treatment years.
Truth is:
I STILL STRUGGLE with these lies.
They resurface shame and guilt that I personally do not enjoy feeling, so I try to ignore them by telling myself another lie: You should be over this. Because those are things of the past, something the old Jen would struggle with. New Jen has her life together. She’s happy and confident and knows where her identity lays. Now that her life is together, she can help others.
But what happens when your life, at least from the inside, begins to fall apart again. What happens when the image you’ve painted for so long, starts to crack, and your desperate attempt to be “OK” just isn’t flying anymore. I hate the fact that my weeds grow back. Maybe not into the full blow tree they were years ago, and maybe there's some new ones, but nonetheless, I find myself shocked and frustrated with their reoccurring appearance. I don’t know why things happen the way they do, why suffering continues to come back over and over.
Years later I find my body broken anew, but this time it's not me beating it up. I think to myself, how ironic that the same body I abused years ago is now abusing me back. I feel like a prisoner in my own body once again, different struggle, same feelings. Once again I find myself calling out for healing. But When something you did to yourself two years ago could be the very reason you’re suffering physically now, it’s kinda hard to believe you can or even should be healed. Where do faith and reality match up? Is God punishing me for my destructive behavior? Does God care that from the moment I wake up I’m uncomfortable in my own bloated, fluffy, acne covered, thick thighed, exhausted, depressed, anxious, lonely skin? Admitting I feel this way sucks because I know the truth. (I debated deleting this part because my insecurities are embarrassing, shocker. But I had to remind myself why I began writing this blog to begin with, so there's the ugly truth .)
"But what I’ve realized I want more than anything, is I want a healed outlook, a completed heart."
In the wake of suffering I begin to grab at the lies again, believing these insecurities and heartaches should be a thing of the past. "Pull yourself together Jen!" I’ve heard it, read it, preached it to myself, gone to counseling for it. But this knowledge gets placed on the back burner and I often put the lies on a pedestal for 95% of the day, and the next day, and the next. I try to quench the pain my way, because asking God first would just be too easy, and we can’t make it too easy now can we. If I know God is real, and God is good, and He has no reason to lie about who I am, why the heck do I keep trudging back to the cross and picking up what Christ laid down His life for: The eating disorder. The depression. The Anxiety. The loneliness. The Self-hate. The IBS, SIBO, PCOS and everything in between.
I’ve had to come face to face with a fact this past week:
There will always be weeds this side of heaven. The garden isn’t perfect over here.
And God isn’t looking down at me shaking His head about my lack of quality weed killer. He doesn’t expect the garden to be prefect so why do I? I have this idea that my struggles are a thing of the past and once conquered always conquered. I see no purpose in feeling that pain again. Yet, somehow, God uses it.
“Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of VARIOUS kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness, and let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing (James 1: 2-4).
Old trials, new trials, future trials, God is completing me through it. I want to be healed, I want to wake up to a body that doesn’t feel broken. I want to be free of the nagging body and food insecurities. I want the heaviness of depression to disappear. But what I’ve realized I want more than anything is I want a healed outlook, a completed heart. So Here I am, begging God to test me, show me what joy and steadfastness look like. Show me what Perfect and complete look like in Him.
I bet His garden is so much more than I could imagine. He chuckles at my blueprints to perfection and my ploys to complete myself. Yet, in his perfect garden, full of every flower you could fathom, the greenest grass your eyes have seen, and the sweetest produce you could ever taste; God jumped the fence, uprooted the tree of lies and stays to help me pull my pesky weeds, so that on that day my garden too will look like His.
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