Weigh In Day

Today was my weigh in day and I lost another pound since last Thursday! That makes a total of 8.5 down. When I get to 10 pounds I am really going to celebrate (not by eating anything) but by doing something fun in the sun. I hope that's by next week. It's been so nice not having to stress at all about it. It feels really good to see the scale continuing to go down each week but that is not my focus. I'm also excited because I'm starting a new bible study tomorrow morning called "Experiencing Spiritual Intimacy" and I'm really looking forward to getting into it. God is becoming more personal to me but it's a work in process and I'm continuing to learn every day what it means to be spiritually intimate with Him so this study will be exciting.

His Holy Spirit, moving and breathing in you, is the most intimate part of your life, making you fit for himself. Don't take such a gift for granted. Ephesians 4:30 MSG

The Light of the World

I just LOVE summertime! This year because we had such a long, cold winter and it didn't even feel like we even had a Spring, I appreciate it even more then I usually do too. There is so much to do and enjoy in the summer. It's a time to relax and just enjoy the beauty that is all around us. Whenever I am outside and I feel the sun shining down on me, I can't help but get an overwhelming warm feeling in my soul as well because it just reminds me that God is the light of the world and that He has filled my soul with His sunshine as well!

We went up to the canyon yesterday and it was SO lush and green and B-E-A-utiful and I just felt at such awe once again that God loves us so much and is such a beautiful artist that He would create such an amazing world for us to live in and enjoy! What overwhelms me even more then that is to think that God himself is more beautiful then any thing we have ever laid our eyes on on this earth and that the place He has prepared for us is FAR more beautiful then we could even imagine! I don't understand how anyone can look at some of the wonderful, amazing things in this world and not be totally blown away by the Creator of it! Boggles my mind...

So today was my weigh in day and the scale is continuing to go down! I'm only down a half a pound but that is just since last Friday so that is awesome! I'm excited about the direction the scale is going but I'm mostly excited about the direction my heart is going!

You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it give light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise you Father in Heaven.

Matthew 5:14-16

God just wants our HEARTS to be clean

I haven't done a weigh in for about two weeks because I wanted to really focus on my relationship with God and not be deterred at all by what the scale said. I will now go back to weighing in every Thursday so I can keep track now that I have my head straight and know that it's not going to deter me anymore.

So this morning I weighed and I had lost another two pounds bringing my total weight loss to 7 pounds! Now you might not think that 7 pounds is that much weight loss for two months of doing this but for me that is HUGE because I had not seen the scale even budge a half a pound for SOOOOOOOOOOO long (up or down) and really, really felt like I was stuck in a rut with my weight! But what has been the most amazing thing to me about the past two months is how much my eyes have been opened and how much my heart has been filled! I am FREE FREE FREE from ever having to even think about dieting, exercising, starving or roller-coasting EVER AGAIN!!! My heart has changed towards the food and God has FREED me from the DESIRE that I used to have to over eat! I used to run to food when I felt anxious or when I was bored and now I don't! Not only do I not run to it, I don't have the desire to!! I have never felt this way in my entire life! Sure my heart toward food had started changing the first time I did Weighdown years ago but because I never fully understood the number ONE most important thing that it teaches, it never changed completely. I can't believe how so very obvious everything is to me this time and I still wonder how I missed it all before. I was just trying to change my portions and listen to hunger and fullness before but I never worked on changing my HEART toward the food and that is why it didn't work. Then this verse that I had heard a thousand times hit me so hard and completely turned everything around for me which in turn, changed my heart:

Seek FIRST his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given you as well. Matthew 6:33

When I quit worrying about the scale and stayed focused on what God was trying to teach me and show me, everything just started falling into place and the scale is going down! I have NO DOUBT at all in my mind that it's going to keep going down too until I'm to the healthy weight that God intends me to be at. I don't even question or worry or stress about it anymore because I am that confident in God and how He is changing my heart! I don't have to follow man made rules anymore!! I'm SO excited with this new found relationship with God! It's growing into a relationship that I have longed for and prayed for!

I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt; open your mouth wide, and I will fill it. Psalm 81:10

He has brought me out of the slavery of Egypt and is taking me to the promised land and I stand in total awe and wonderment of Him!

The following is an excerpt from the book Rise Above by Gwen Shamblin that I just finished reading. It was an amazing book and SO insightful:

We have spent all of our energy on cleaning up the wrong things. Jesus said not to take the splinter out of someone else’s eye when we have a log in our own. We must first take the log out of our own eye; then we can see clearly to remove the speck out of someone else’s eye (Matthew 7:3-5). We are scared of “unclean” things on this earth, but what SHOULD scare us are the unclean things that God reveals about our own hearts! The heart is what is greedy. The alcohol is not evil-God created it. The money is not evil. The food is not evil. Sex is not evil. Tobacco is not evil. It is the worship of these things that is evil. Worship is focus and adoration. We worship these things. It is what you are drooling over in your heart that should bring you to your knees…because you can get the alcohol out of the house or the fat grams out of the house, but you cannot run from your own heart and mind. And your heart and mind will face the Judgment Day. You must change and pray-pray hard-for a cleansing from the Father through Jesus Christ.

On behalf of people living in the last few decades, let’s concede that we have never been told that we have a heart problem. I have a master’s degree in foods and nutrition, and yet I never studied the greed in the heart of mankind. We only dissected the content of the foods and labeled each ingredient as clean or unclean. And again, my experience has been that most churches have bought into the man-made clean and unclean rules. Everyone - even in church - confidently and self-righteously preached that broccoli was righteous, and that brownies and ice cream were sinful. But now we know the truth. The food is clean-God just wants our HEARTS to be clean.

DUN DUN DUN...I will weigh in tomorrow morning: Update to come. LOL

"Hungry"- by Kutless

Hungry I come to You
For I know You satisfy
I am empty but I know
Your love does not run dry

So I wait for You
So I wait for You

I'm falling on my knees
Offering ALL of me
Jesus You're all
this heart is living for

Broken I run to You
For Your arms are open wide
I am weary but I know Your touch
Restores my Life

So I wait for You
So I wait for You

I'm falling
I'm falling for You

Jesus You're all
This heart is living for
I'm living for you

I Love love love the words to this song!!

And the scale is going DOWN!!

Where to even start?! The past ten days or so have been SO crazy, yet awesome, yet crazy, yet amazing! I feel like an addict who finally admitted and truly believed for the first time in my heart of hearts that I do have a problem with making food an idol in my life and that was the first step to truly starting the "healing and recovering" process. I know it sounds weird but although I thought I admitted it and had a problem, I found that I didn't really truly believe I did and it was stopping me from embracing the entire teachings of the Weighdown program completely. I kept going back and forth in my mind and justifying my overeating and love of food and trying to convince myself that that wasn't the problem and that my heart has changed quite a bit over the past few years so there was no way I still put food on a pedestal of any sort! Well because I wouldn't truly admit to myself that that WAS indeed the problem, God had to make it VERY clear to me and convict me of it so that there was NO question in my mind whatsoever as to whether or not this was the case. That is exactly what He did last week. I just completely got honest with God and once again, poured out my heart to Him on exactly why I was feeling and thinking the way I was. I no sooner got done praying to Him and I heard a voice in my head clearly that said to get my Bible. I did and I let it fall open and it opened right to the section about idols and the disasters that will occur as a result of following them. I felt so confirmed by everything I read that night but then again the next day I felt like I was thrown right back into confusion and doubt all over again. By that night my head was pounding and I was feeling SO frustrated! I again prayed to God and got out my bible and again let it fall open. This time it fell open to a completely different book in the bible then the night before but again it was all about the story of Moses and the Exodus. I thought, "that's weird...let's see if it happens again." I then opened it up to a completely different section and the exact page it fell on AGAIN was the story of the Exodus in a different book. I then had the audacity to still say to God, "okay, I will know without a doubt if I close my eyes and shuffle through my bible and it falls one more time on this story somehow, that this is really what your Will for me is". Well, let me just tell you, I am in the dessert for SURE and it's God's Will for my life right now. It fell open a FOURTH time to a different book in the bible but all about the Exodus and idol worship! I am just AMAZED at times how much God is really listening and it trying to get US to listen and TRUST Him! Furthermore I'm amazed how much HE really cares about speaking to little 'old me.

So that night I finally accepted and admitted and repented from the bottom of my heart for the first time for making food an idol and putting it before God and I went to bed and slept SO peacefully. Then the next morning I woke up and did my bible study and prayed and I asked God to please speak words of comfort to me this time through His word since the last FOUR times I let it fall open it was all about His wrath if I continued to follow my idol. I just felt like I needed to hear words of compassion and be reminded that He still loves me. It's funny but I literally felt like a child who had been scolded and then needed reassurance from their daddy that they were still loved. So I went and grabbed my bible and again flipped through it letting it stop wherever it landed just knowing that God would stop it on what He wanted me to read. Well once again I was blown away on the page it stopped on and here it is:

I will hear their waywardness and love them freely, for my anger has turned away from them. I will be like the dew to Israel; he will blossom like a lily. Like a cedar of Lebanon he will send down his roots; his young shoots will grow. His splendor will be like an olive tree, his fragrance like a cedar of Lebanon. Men will dwell again in his shade. He will flourish like the grain. He will blossom like a vine, and his fame will be like the wine from Lebanon. O Ephraim, what more have I to do with Idols? I will answer him and care for him. I am like a green pine tree; your fruitfulness comes from me. Hosea 12:9

I was so filled with love and awe for God that He is SO personal especially when we need Him to be and that day was amazing to me. That day was the first day that I was SO obedient in everything I ate and I really just tried to listen for His lead and guidance. Then the next morning I decided to weigh in. When I stepped on the scale it had gone UP on pound. My first reaction was anger and I felt like I wanted to "throw in the towel" and give up. Then I pictured Satan smiling and having his way and instead I gave it all back to God and prayed about it and went on to forget it and just trust in Him. Then the next morning I woke up and was not even planning to weigh at all. I was brushing my teeth and I literally heard a voice in my head tell me to step on the scale. I was like, "no way! I just did yesterday and was up a pound." thinking I must be hearing things. I got done brushing my teeth and heard it again really clearly this time saying again Step on the scale. So I did and I literally did a double-take because it was now down TWO pounds from the day before, which means I had lost another pound! I got off and back on to make sure that I wasn't seeing things and it was the same!! I was SO happy to see that extra pound gone because the scale hadn't budged at all for about three weeks!! So to sum up this ridiculously long post I just need to end with this verse because it popped in my head right when I got off the scale that morning:

For His anger lasts only a moment, but his favor lasts a lifetime; weeping may remain for a night, but rejoicing comes in the morning. Psalm 30:5

The Pearl Necklace

A cheerful girl with bouncy golden curls was almost five. Waiting with her mother at the checkout stand, she saw them: a circle of glistening white pearls in a pink foil box. "Oh please, Mommy. Can I have them? Please, Mommy, please!"
Quickly the mother checked the back of the little foil box and then looked back into the pleading blue eyes of her little girl's upturned face. "A dollar ninety-five. That's almost $2.00. If you really want them, I'll think of some extra chores for you and in no time you can save enough money to buy them for yourself. Your birthday's only a week away and you might get another crisp dollar bill from grandma."
As soon as Jenny got home, she emptied her penny bank and counted out 17 pennies. After dinner, she did more than her share of chores and she went to the neighbor and asked if she could pick dandelions for ten cents. On her birthday, Grandma did give her another new dollar bill and at last she had enough money to buy the necklace.
Jenny loved her pearls. They made her feel dressed up and grown up. She wore them everywhere--Sunday school, kindergarten, even to bed. The only time she took them off was when she went swimming or had a bubble bath. Mother said if they got wet, they might turn her neck green.
Jenny had a very loving daddy and every night when she was ready for bed, he would stop whatever he was doing and come upstairs to read her a story. One night when he finished the story, he asked Jenny, "Do you love me?"
"Oh yes, Daddy. You know that I love you."
"Then give me your pearls."
"Oh, Daddy, not my pearls. But you can have Princess-- the white horse from my collection. The one with the pink tail. Remember, Daddy? The one you gave me. She's my favorite."
"That's okay, Honey. Daddy loves you. Good night." And he brushed her cheek with a kiss.
About a week later, after the story time, Jenny's daddy asked again, "Do you love me?"
" Daddy, you know I love you."
"Then give me your pearls."
"Oh Daddy, not my pearls. But you can have my babydoll. The brand new one I got for my birthday. She is so beautiful and you can have the yellow blanket that matches her sleeper."
"That's okay. Sleep well. God bless you, little one. Daddy loves you." And as always, he brushed her cheek with a gentle kiss.
A few nights later when her daddy came in, Jenny was sitting on her bed with her legs crossed Indian-style. As he came close, he noticed her chin was trembling and one silent tear rolled down her cheek. "What is it, Jenny? What's the matter?"
Jenny didn't say anything but lifted her little hand up to her daddy. And, when she opened it, there was her little pearl necklace. With a little quiver, she finally said, "Here, Daddy. It's for you."
With tears gathering in his own eyes, Jenny's kind daddy reached out with one hand to take the dime-store necklace, and with the other hand he reached into his pocket and pulled out a blue velvet case with a strand of beautiful genuine pearls. He had had them all the time. He was just waiting for her to give up the dime-store stuff so he could give her genuine treasure.
Question- what imitations are we holding onto that stops us from receiving God's genuine treasures?
Author Unknown

A women from the Weighdown message boards shared this story with everyone and I had to post it because it really hit home with me. I know God is just wanting me to "let go" and give up total control to Him because He has something so much better in store for me. I just have to trust Him and let go of my own dollar store pearls that I've been hanging onto so tightly and allow Him to replace them with beautiful, real ones.

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Luke 12:34