My husband posted an innocent request for weight loss tips on his Facebook page. It started off innocently enough with people offering helpful tidbits. Then I jumped on and made a self-deprecating joke and the well-meaning advice began. Everyone had all these great tips to share with me, and I was so touched that everyone was trying so hard to help me. Here, I had inadvertently hijacked my hubs' post with my own selfish request to lose that extra 20lbs that's been plaguing me for the last 2+ years. And suddenly as I'm reading all of these comments, my mental demons start to emerge. Instead of reading them for the help they were trying to be, I started twisting them into a way to come down on myself. Every comment read like, "Well I do (insert diet regimen here) and I lost 400lbs in 10 minutes! What's YOUR problem? Why are YOU failing so much?" Did they write this? Not remotely. But despite the hours of therapy I've sat through, I still have demons that apparently like to come out and show their fugly faces at inopportune times. And I didn't even realize I was demon wrestling until one friend reminded me that if I have 1) God, 2) my adoring husband, and 3) my adoring son, life is a-okay. Cut to me reading her comment, bawling, and then kicking off this blog post. Clearly if I'm reacting this way, there is something deeper going on here.
I have felt off.
I have felt that spiritual laziness kick in these past few months. Meaning to talk to God more, but not doing it. Meaning to read scripture more, but not doing it. All these things I'm wanting to accomplish, yet I hear myself talking and I see myself not doing. Jesus was a man of action. I feel like the farthest thing from action right now. And here I am, complaining on Facebook that I can't lose weight. Talk about first world problems. But it's not just that. It's the uncanny ability I have to beat the shit out of myself for my shortcomings, or to compare myself with others over completely insane things, as if this whole game of life is just one big competition that I am always losing by a hair. My brain knows all of these things but it's getting my emotional/psychological wiring to jump on board which is the hard part.
It's amazing how when we let the little stresses build up and we don't acknowledge them, they turn into one big ball of stress that levels you flat. I think mine morphed into that gigantic rock at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark, and it's been rolling towards me for a while now, chasing me until I can't outrun it and BLAM! It flattens me like a pancake in the form of me bawling in response to being told "you are loved". And as much as I want to armchair psychology the crap out of this thing right now, I will fight the urge and try to keep the lesson I've learned simple.
God spoke through my friend tonight. I felt that pit of unease, obsession, anxiety during that post tonight and then in one quick sentence, she slapped some sense into me with the reminder that HEY! God loves YOU! Imperfect, bad at being on time to anything ever, doesn't practice her cello enough, still way too pessimistic, uninspired by her job at times, overanalytical, obsessive, hypersensitive, talks too much and acts too little YOU! And I don't deserve it. I don't deserve the love I get from God. I don't deserve the friends I have who are instruments of his message. And yet I have them. I am so lucky beyond words. And don't get me started on how lucky I am to have actually found a man that I'm happily married to, and to be blessed with a child. A child! Me! Selfish, neurotic, exhausting me gets to play mom to the greatest kid on the planet! I can't even begin to cover those blessings. They're on a whole different level.
Anyway, through my (over?)reaction to that message, God forced me to stop in my tracks and reevaluate. I need to take our associate pastor's advice to be kind and gentle to those we meet, as everyone carries a heavy load...except the person I need to be more kind and gentle to right now is me.
