The Promising Transformation

I have gained weight because of several things. Such as the Medicine I was on for the ADHD. But most of all, I have gained weight perhaps because of the hurt that people in middle school before and after this time as well. For whatever reason, they decided to make me the target of their attack and I am sure that they did not intend for the hurt to go that deep, none of us do. Because of all this plus many others I translated the hurt that I received into eating food.

Now if I were to lose the weight and assuming that the weight is the physical representation of the hurt that I have been carrying around for 21 years and have yet to be completely healed of. Then is it not possible that when I lose the weight then I will be (in a most literal sense) able to begin a new. That I would be washed white as snow. That is to say that I would have gotten rid of the physical manifestations of my hurt.

If all this is true then Gods promises to heal all man when surrendered to him is true, at least in my life. When my flesh surrenders to the healing process, all the habits that it is used to having will have to be killed off. My flesh will go through a sort of dying, dying to its selfish nature and to its own will. By this I mean that when I exercise and deny myself rest, and when I eat healthy and deny myself the food I want, then I will be conforming my flesh to not only my will but in turn to the will of God. For it is to him that my spirit yearns to surrender.

My body is a temple and I have thus far not treated it like Gods. But instead have let it go its own way. By me giving into all that it wanted I lost control of it. Now the only thing left to do is to starve it into submission; to kill it off and to begin a new. As I’m writing, I think of the lizard and the man in the book The Great Divorcé, by C.S Lewis, when the man let the angel kill the lizard (which was the manifestations of the mans lust) not only did the thing die but it was reborn a stallion. I also remember that the process caused the man great pain. But he was also reborn and now he was the master of the stallion. Unlike before when the lizard controlled his thoughts. This is I think the best example of what God want for me. If I can succeed in fully surrendering to the will of the father then I will have become master of not only my body, but also my hurt. This example is not a perfect one though. Mainly because God has still to do the final work in me. What I mean is that even after the transformations I will still be living and because I believe that God will never stop working on you in this life then I will still have a lot of conforming to his will ahead of me. Also in the fact that I believe that the transformation he is still to do after death will so exceed anything he is or will ever do here on the earth.
Back to the lizard and the man. When the lizard (which again was the manifestation of the mans lust) was killed off and became a stallion, it was not just reborn, but it was reborn as the risen body of Love. All things in us can go on to haven (or as the book said to the mountains) but nothing not even the noblest thing can go on until it submits to death. All things that were once our masters such as lust, food, pity, anger, hurt, loss, and self hatred will become the servants to our will, but only after we submit to the Father. This is what true freedom is, not the ability to do what ever we want, but the able to control or hungers and lusts. I wonder what the risen body of my hurt and indulgent will look like.

And we know that God causes all things to work together for the good of those who love Him, to those who are called according to His purpose. (Roman 8:28). When I became a middle school leader I understood that God was going to use the pain and hurt I had experience in middle school to help the kids I was going to be leading. I am able to relate to them and the struggle they are going throw because God allowed me to feel and experience such hurt. I know now that God works all things for his glory. He alone made my pain into something that I would not trade for the world. And now he will do it again, when I finally shed this weight I will be able to not only help those who are in a similar situation, but God will have won me another piece of my freedom back, and I suspect that I will be call into something new and related to the struggle I would have just come out of. Like Rob Bell said in his book Sex God, “We can do one of two things, we can charge into haven and bring hell with us, or we can charge into hell and bring haven with us.” In other words we have the choice of making this earth a better place by using our hurt and talents to heal and help. Or we can become bitter and self loathing, hating life, God, and people. This is of course not as easy as I make it sound. It takes God to come and make our hurt and pain into something wonderful. We cannot do it by ourselves; if we could I would suspect that we would screw it up even worse. The only thing we can do to start this process of healing, is to fall at the feet of God and surrender. God will welcome you as the father in the story of the prodigals son, did to his son. He saw him from a long way off and ran to him. God is waiting and watching for you to come into sight so he can run to meet you as you turn towards home.