My Fault

First the good news.  I survived the traveling this weekend.  I did well - or as well as I could being in the car a lot.  Long drives just don't lend themselves to healthy behaviors.  And no matter if you order grilled chicken salads at fast food places or not, the sodium content alone is going to wreck havoc with your eating efforts.  (Adding in beef jerky certainly doesn't help in the salt category.)  That all being said, I had my weigh in this morning and had lost 3+ pounds.  I was down to 336.2.  (When did we have to start including tenths of pounds?)  So, I've lost almost twenty pounds in two weeks.  I was a little discouraged.  That first mammoth weight drop is always nice - and something I would love to recreate each week.  But that isn't realistic.  I'm averaging about 1/2 pound a day.  That's fine.  At that rate, I would be 150 pounds by the end of the year.  And I would not exist the next year.  HA HA.  Just kidding. I know that at some point I will switch to maintenance instead of weight loss.  But I'll deal with that later.

One thing that I wanted to address in this post came to mind courtesy of my good buddy Jeff Williams at First Baptist Church of Temple Terrace.  We took my mom to church yesterday and we were able to be there for a tremendous time of worship.  This is the church where I started my life in ministry.  Heather and I got married there.  It holds a lot of memories (most of them good).  Jeff and I served together while I was there.  So it is always nice to go back and hear him preach.  And it is nice to see old friends again - and meet new ones, like their amazing new worship pastor Eric.

Anyway, Jeff was preaching on James 1.  Specifically, he was preaching on verses 13-15.  Here they are, so you don't have to go find your Bible.

Let no one say when he is tempted, "I am being tempted by God," for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one. But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death

Jeff went on to mention that a lot of times we like to point fingers at all the things that have contributed to getting us into our messes.  We blame people all over the place.  But we don't want to blame ourselves.  But it says very clearly in the Bible, and in that part I put in italics, that it is our own desires that are the worse things.  Jeff said that influences do play a part - and in some cases a big part.  But when it all comes down to it, we have to take responsibility for our own actions.

This whole process of examining my food issues is important because it helps me to see WHY I am doing things instead of just fighting against invisible enemies.  Why is it that certain foods and experiences are so important?  That will help me to fight better than saying that I just can't have something.  And in that exploration, I uncover some influences.  But, while I do point the finger, I must remember that there are four fingers pointing back at me.  [Actually, there are only three fingers pointing back at me.  My thumb doesn't point back at me when I am pointing at someone.  It points at that person.  It always had.  I hated having someone say that four fingers thing.  What kind of weirdo twists their thumb backwards to point at themselves?  It just isn't natural.]

My father did have a large influence on my food issues.  That is undeniable.  But he didn't force me to eat things.  He didn't hold me down on the ground and force feed me HoHos.  He didn't make me sit at the table and not get up until I ate my mozzarella sticks.  Those were my choices.  I may not have been able to control all my meal content growing up, but I determined my snacks and desserts - especially in my teen years.  And, the most important and damning point, my true food problem explosion happened once I was on my own in college.  If I had truly wanted to do things right, that would have been the perfect time.  I didn't have to worry about influence there.  But my own desires lured me and enticed me into a Pizza Hut Bigfoot pizza.

The thing about my dad is that he had four major addictions, in addition to other issues like temper.  He was addicted to alcohol, nicotine, food, and gambling.  I chose to NOT follow in his footsteps in three of those issues.  How did I do it?  I never allowed myself to even begin to entertain thoughts in those areas. I have never even had a drink of alcohol - even avoiding cough medicines and desserts with too much alcohol content.  I have not ever tried a cigarette, cigaweed, cigar, dip, chaw, chew, snuff, or any other drug or varient of tobacco.  And I don't play the lottery, didn't play a penny on our cruise or my trip to Vegas.  With alcohol, I know that I drink a lot of whatever liquid I drink.  And I know that it is dangerous to even introduce something like that into a body like mine.  So I didn't even try.

But with food, I chose to follow my own desires.  And I have continued to do that on a regular basis.  While I strongly believe there is truth in the fact that there are influences that make it easier to go down a certain path, I also believe that it is up to each of us to make choices about our behavior.  Even if I am able to figure out exactly why each food is a trigger, and why certain holidays are triggers, and who pushed me to the brink of this hole - if I don't come to the place where I can see my own role in all of this, I'll never change.  I will just sit there and have lots of people and things to blame.  I am the one who has to stop. I'm the only one who can make myself stop.  I had people who helped me get here, and I have people who are going to help me get out.  But that all circles around me and my choices.  I have to humble myself, turn to God, beg for help, and make the right choices.