Sweet Grace for Your Journey

I would not have known the real meaning of restore at the beginning of this year. To be restored, I had to face my own mortality. I’ve faced it many times. Now that I’m through my recent abdominal surgery, I can talk about it more. There is just something that happens inside you when a surgeon says, “This is what we want to do, but to tell you the truth, we’ve never seen this before and we don’t know what we’ll find when we get in there.”

I learned in my teens that JOY means Jesus first, Others second, then Yourself. The message I heard from every pulpit was that focusing on myself would be selfish and only get me in trouble. I understand clearly where this message comes from and it is true. We are humans and such we are self-centered and want what we want. The JOY acronym, though, is misleading.

I was guilty of continuing to eat whatever I wanted whenever I wanted even though I was an adult and I knew the ramifications. Most of what I ate was candy, sweet treats and desserts. I wasn’t stupid. I knew exactly what I was doing to my body. I was guilty of not doing what God wanted me too and I was ashamed. I lived in my little town of one called sugar shame.

Comfort is an interesting word. When we dissect it, what we mean is really selfish. It’s all about what I want and nothing about what God wants for me.
He is calling me and you to go much, much deeper with Him. He is calling us to a new level. He is calling us to transformation and He is using our issues with food to do it. He’s redefining what comfort looks like and feels like for us.

We all know when it comes to a battle of Jesus versus our own personal strongholds, Jesus is going to win. Right? Well, it’s only right if we are putting our trust in Jesus instead of the stronghold we are hiding behind. We must take stand against the stronghold we have set up in our lives. Satan would want nothing better to whisper in your ear that you are defeated. But I’m telling you that you are only defeated if you want to be.

I hear the words cancel culture thrown around a lot, but I’d like to recommend instead of canceling culture, let’s do what Jesus said. Let’s change the culture around us.

The last several days I’ve been working on developing my new Breaking Strongholds course. It’s interesting going back through my journey and seeing the crazy things I believed and did. It’s sort of like my life is a movie and I’m watching it play out and rooting for myself to make the right choices knowing time and time again I didn’t.

Then, I watch how God throws in a plot twist which takes my story in an entirely different direction. I’m grateful for His plot twists. Without them I know I’d be dead today. I made so many bad decisions in my life I’m surprised God ever got through to me.

“Where did you learn your relationship with food?” The question invaded my mind. Not for a second did I wonder whether or not I had a relationship with food. I knew I did, and I knew I learned it from my loving Grandma, who fed us with every kind of food we wanted including every type of dessert. We could eat as much as we wanted whenever we wanted it.

We all need comfort, but true comfort should not come from the foods we eat. When that happens, comfort foods can become a stronghold that keeps us from true comfort which can only be found in the Holy Spirit.

All I ever wanted was to lose weight and do it simply and easily. What I learned over and over again, though, is that gaining weight is so much easier than losing it. So, here are 21 Ways to Gain Weight. On this episode I talk about false mindsets, false protections and strongholds, so be sure to listen to it. On the podcast I give an action step which seems simple but may be really difficult for those caught in the cycle of eat-gain-eat. Rewrite the 21 ways to gain weight into 21 ways to lose weight. Listen to the podcast for a few of my answers to the first 10.

On Transformation Island, the first thing we must do is work on the inside. We have to begin to identify the core issues we have which are holding us back from wanting to change. Transformation will not happen without some major changes in our lives. Those changes are not just in what we eat and how we move. They are in why we eat what we eat, especially if it is unhealthy for us or is in a quantity we know is not healthy for us. The changes are also in why we refuse to move when we know it will help our health to do that.

Out of our biggest mess comes our greatest message. I know this is true for me. For years I felt like a mess. I tried to fix it myself but every time I tried to diet, it would just result in me losing weight and gaining it back again plus more. Dieting made me fatter.

I made a big mess but I worked with God to help me clean it up. When I finally got through that God started revealing the message He had for me to share. It came out of my experiences.

God does have good plans for us. What He says in Jeremiah 29:11 is not just a cliché, it’s a solid truth. “For I know the plans I have for you,” says the Lord. “They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope.”God said this and we say we believe it but do we really. Do we really think God has good plans for us? Because right now everywhere we look there seems to be disaster.