Well the South side of Chicago, is the baddest part of town, and if you go down there you better just beware of a man named Leroy Brown. – Jim Croce
He’s standing in the shadows there, steely-eyed and fierce. He peers from beneath the dark gray fedora with bloodshot eyes and a hint of stale tobacco on his breath. I am walking down the sidewalk with a skip in my step and a happy song in my head until I hear him whisper, “Would you like a brownie little girl?”
My heart starts to race. I look around me to see if anyone is watching. I want the brownie, but I don’t want anyone to see me take it from him. I take a step forward. I lift my hand up. He holds out the brownie on a white porcelain plate–still warm from the oven and delectably fudgy. The smell of it rises into my nostrils and I am a pile of goo. I want it so bad I can already taste it. In fact, I may as well have, it’s just that close. Bad Leroy Brownie is at it again, and I love to hate that ugly brother.
If you are reading this and have never lusted after anything, you must be a zombie–i.e., you are dead. We all have that thing that “gets” us every time. My thing just happens to be food.
Now dear reader, lest you think I’m a big whiney baby, I am not alone. In fact, just yesterday I was on the phone with the man from tech support at work. Barney (not his real name) was working on solving my laptop issue when I heard the crinkle of plastic in the background. He said, “Oh, don’t mind that. I just need to eat a cookie.” I thought, ‘Ah, sweet cookie of gladness how I miss thee,’ but in real life I said, “That cookie is going to kill you.”
Thank goodness he didn’t hang up the phone and leave me to fix my own laptop. We had a brief chat about weight loss and regain while he ate the cookie in my ear. Then I charmed myself out of temptation by reading stories on the internet about celebrities who have undergone gastric bypass surgery; including those who found success and those who failed miserably. But stories don’t keep me from indulging any more than $23,000 cures the problem of gluttony.
Aisha Sultan from the Post Dispatch wrote an insightful article yesterday titled, “Why Can’t I lose Weight?” She lamented age as a contributor to a slowed metabolism and I could certainly relate. Sometimes I feel like if I even think about bathing in brownies, I gain weight. And this is the point in the blog where I hang my head in shame and admit that I ate a pan of brownies in December and I still haven’t lost the 5 pounds I gained from eating it. Bad Leroy Brownie stuck it to me in the keister again.
I am 9 years into my journey and I should make a few things very clear. I have established healthy habits and I am still lured by temptation. The only reason I have not gained all the weight back is because of the Holy Spirit and His restraining grace.
“The Holy Spirit causes our hearts to abound in grace and the fruits that are contrary to the flesh, and the fruits thereof and principles of them. He is the fire which burns up the very root of lust.”
John Owen
I recently explained to my grandfather that when I first began to walk and weighed 310 pounds, I listened to my bible as I walked up grueling hills. I hated to exercise so much that I needed God’s voice in my ear urging me forward. I knew He was the only one who could save me from the pit of food addiction–indeed from any and every addiction. And He did. One step at a time. One healthy choice at a time. And because he saved me from the miry depths of despair, I found a sweetness in relationship with him that I never knew before. Because only by experiencing the agony of crucifying my passions did Jesus become more real and innately precious to me.
Dear reader, if you are fighting addiction today, He is the only one who will give you sustaining relief AND joy in the process. Once I learned that abstaining from gluttony gives my Father joy, I found what truly motivates me to smear those homemade-straight-from-the-oven brownies in Bad Leroy Brownie’s face.
If you are reading this today and have an “impossible” addiction, take heart! Cry out to Jesus. Surrender your life to Him. Ask him to cure the sin in your heart and save you. He can do this. You can stop. He will help.
And lest you think I’m full of really stinky beans, I’m fighting today myself. I shoveled too much snow and then went sledding–landed hard–and bruised my tailbone. So I’m fighting self-pity–not with brownies–but with the precious Word of God. And this is how I punched Bad Leroy Brownie in the jaw and sent him reeling…Psalm 34. Because that is my weapon of choice today. And dear readers, it is very, very sharp!
I love that Psalm!