Destination Discipline

I walked into the store and blithely noticed the holiday décor. A large package caught my eye (as it was designed to do) and I stopped. I stared in horror at the monstrosity. The selection of gigantic candy baffled the senses. A ring pop that was the size of a softball. Yard stick sized Twizzlers. Hershey kisses that could be basketballs. Had I entered some terrible processed-food-hocking hell?

I would only later think about the marketeers who conjured up such processed peculiarities. The hedonistic henchmen who—like gold prospectors did in the early 1800’s—desire to mine every cent from the consumer’s pocket by way of their stomach.

Now maybe you are reading this and thinking, “So what? Who cares if they make giant candy? It’s not like they are hurting anybody. Margaret, you are jerk! I love golf ball sized jelly beans! Shut your orating orifice.”

All right. I hear you. Let me back up a bit and explain why I hate giant candy. It may not be the reason you think.

When I was a little girl, my mother had a dear friend named Pat. Every Christmas she would visit my mother and bring me and my sister a large candy cane stick. I remember the first time I saw it. It was amazing! It was like a candy cane only bigger and it lasted a lot longer. I remember cutting my tongue while sucking on it and enjoying every second. Thirty something years have passed but every time I come across one of those candy cane sticks, I think of Pat. Memories swell like a cloud of beautiful butterflies and I am incited to buy one. I want to feel like I did when I was young and carefree—back before adulthood knocked me in the head with a horseshoe.

This is what we call nostalgia. Nostalgia is a wonderful feeling I am prone to embrace like a mug of (sugar free!) hot chocolate on a cold night. Unfortunately, greedy corporations have learned to prey on this feeling. They use our feelings to entice us to unclench our fists and let the coins roll from our palm to theirs. This is manipulation and I think it is wrong.

The holidays can be particularly difficult for our friends and neighbors because of nostalgia. If someone has lost a loved one or has particularly painful memories, a song, a smell, or yes, even a glimpse of candy can start a fire they cannot easily extinguish. Some run to alcohol or drugs to numb the pain. Others use food like a tonic-time machine to evoke memories the past. The manipulations are endless.

The sugar addict in me finds it difficult to gaze on candy (especially Recess Peanut butter cups and M&M’s). And while I have practice at walking away, there are times I still pray, “God help me not to buy and eat that thing that to me is sin.”

The Bible specifically condemns idolatry and sensuality. First, I know I have a problem with food as an idol. Second, my favorite place to eat dessert is generally in bed (with a good book).  And while many do not equate eating with sensuality, the passion with which many gluttons approach putting food into their mouths is, well, grossly exaggerated to the point of sensuality.

“But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.” – Galatian 5:16-24

The bible doesn’t condemn idolatry and sensuality because it wants to keep me from having any fun (as many people think it does). The bible is mainly interested in setting captive people free. That is why Jesus came to earth—to set me free from my sin. He had strong words for people prone to lust in his “sermon on the mount”. “If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell.” (Matthew 5:29-30)

There is something worse than obesity: hell. Yes, it is a real place.

This is why I hate greedy corporations that manipulate my emotions so that I will become addicted to their products. They want to separate me from the love of Christ. When I lived in slavery to food and topped the scales over 300 pounds, I felt like I had no hope of ever breaking free of the need to live for food. When my blessed Savior gently told me I needed to learn discipline, I discovered that saying “no” to my craving for physical pleasure brought me into closer relationship with God. The difficulty with which I learned how to stop consuming processed foods and sugar caused me to rely upon the promises of God by way of his words in the bible. Only then did I experience the sweetest sensation known to mankind; the pure love of God.

We are at the very beginning of the holiday season. The (marketing) vultures are circling. The ravening lions (Hershey, Nabisco, etc.) are sharpening their teeth. The geniuses who use “A Christmas Story” as a weapon are set to stoke our emotions—along with our appetites—and nothing short of the Bumpass Hounds will stop us from consuming our Thanksgiving turkeys to the detriment of our waistlines. Who will save us from annihilation?

Jesus.

The Apostle Paul once wrote, “So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” (1 Corinthians 10:31). Today, if you are struggling with the holiday of horrific proportions, take heart! The captive can be set free by calling on the name of Jesus. One does not need to indulge to reminisce. One can celebrate with love instead of food (or alcohol or nicotine or marijuana or meth). Nostalgia may invoke memories from indulgences of years past, but it can also be the impetus for creating new and beautiful memories of the captive who tastes the sweetness of true freedom.

“Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good. Blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him!” Psalm 34:8

There seems ever to have been a proneness in the brilliant and warm-blooded to fall into this vice–the demon of intemperance ever seems to have delighted in sucking the blood of genius and of generosity.”

Abraham Lincoln

Several years ago I was at a party where I encountered friends I had not seen in in a long time. One friend in particular had gained so much weight I did not recognize her. I suppose she thought me rude when we were talking because I didn’t engage as I normally do with an old friend. Sure, she seemed familiar but because I wasn’t aware of our shared history, I politely conversed with her in ignorance, too embarrassed to ask her name.

After talking to her husband, I mentioned to mine that I was looking for her. He said, “But Margaret, you’ve been talking to her for the past half an hour.” I was mortified. She was so physically altered that I simply did not know what to say; especially in light of my radical weight loss.

I know all too well the helpless feeling of gaining weight and running into someone I haven’t seen in a while. The freight train of negative thoughts was always quick to crush me under its wheels.

Please don’t mention my weight. Please don’t ask me what happened; I don’t know what happened myself. I don’t want to talk about it. Please don’t make me talk about it. All while smiling and trying to reminisce.

If the person was a close friend I would make excuses. “I’ve been under a lot of pressure at work. The baby isn’t sleeping. I’ve been sick. I had surgery. I have a slow metabolism.” When I look back at all the excuses I made over the years for why I gained weight, I consider them fuel for the fire that burns in me now to maintain my liberty from that wicked master: Gluttony.

Abraham Lincoln hated slavery. He despised the man in chains, held captive by a militant master. He saw alcoholism as no lesser an evil. As I read his speech to the Springfield Washingtonian Temperance Society on February 22, 1842, I couldn’t help but wonder what he would think of my fellow American’s and their propensity to eat. Would he ask for the “temples and altars, where the rites of his idolatrous worship have long been performed, and where human sacrifices have long been wont to be made” to be “daily desecrated and deserted” as he did of the vice of drink?

The addict does not generally view his addiction with such dire terminology. We kiss the monster that curses us for another hit of bliss even as we die in its embrace. While enthralled, we are blind to the chains that bind us even as we secretly long for someone to set us free.

Discipline is the key to freedom.

Discipline has been a dear friend in recent months as I encountered challenges both mentally and physically. A Tuesday night last week found me stressed out and in the aisle at Sam’s Club craving peanut M&M’s. I touched the large container on the shelf and started to salivate. I had been crying over an especially awful encounter with my son’s principal and his unkind treatment of my son when I dropped by the store to buy dog food. Instead, I stood sobbing in the candy aisle while I considered how comforting it would be to drown my sorrows in sugar-soaked drops of chocolate. Instead, I immediately stopped and texted my friend Becky.

“Pray for me! I am sorely tempted to flush this sh*tty day down the toilet with some M&M’s.”

She responded, “Get out of there now!”

And I did. I didn’t even pause to wonder what all the shoppers thought of the galloping girl with the 30 pound bag of dog food slung over her shoulder. I did this because I know candy will not heal the emotional pain, it will only add another burden to a load that is already too heavy to bear.

Abraham Lincoln is rightly revered for his dedication to abolish slavery. I was unaware, until today, of how favorably he viewed the temperance movement. But what most struck me about this speech was how he viewed the religious ilk of his day in response to that epidemic. He said, “They [are supposed to] have no sympathy of feeling or interest with those very persons whom it is their object to convince and persuade.”

And he empathized with those afflicted.

For the man suddenly or in any other way to break off from the use of drams, who has indulged in them for a long course of years and until his appetite for them has grown ten or a hundredfold stronger and more craving than any natural appetite can be, requires a most powerful moral effort. In such an undertaking he needs every moral support and influence that can possibly be brought to his aid and thrown around him. And not only so, but every moral prop should be taken from whatever argument might rise in his mind to lure him to his backsliding. When he casts his eyes around him, he should be able to see all that he respects, all that he admires, all that he loves, kindly and anxiously pointing him onward, and none beckoning him back to his former miserable “wallowing in the mire.”

Abraham Lincoln

Discipline has taught me that denial of the gluttonous impulse is the highest form of freedom. I asked God to give me a deeper love–a love that would satisfy the true longings of my heart the way candy, soda or fast food never did. In order to break the chains of that horrible addiction, I had to repeatedly deny my baser instincts and cling to something good. I clung to Jesus who promised to “never leave or forsake me”. This true love was more powerful than food or drink. It still is. And I had good friends, like my Becky, who surrounded me with love and support.

Today, if you are that friend who has put on so much weight as to be unrecognizable, if you feel the weight of years held captive to cravings of unnatural appetites that refuse to be satisfied, take heart! Pray for God to teach you discipline. Pray to be an avid pupil. And begin the thrilling and rewarding journey that will forever transform your life.

Abe Lincoln was a warrior who fought valiantly to free slaves. I like to think he is cheering me on from Heaven. If you are reading this and trying to find hope, I believe he is cheering you on too!

And when the victory shall be complete, when there shall be neither a slave nor a drunkard on the earth, how proud the title of that land which may truly claim to be the birthplace and the cradle of both those revolutions that shall have ended in that victory.

Abraham Lincoln

I was a young girl when a missionary who was staying with my parents gave me a most precious book, Little Pilgrim’s Progress. I read it with joy as a girl and again as an adult, but I had no real appreciation for the story until a few years ago when I began to read John Bunyan’s original classic, “A Pilgrim’s Progress”.

I had not thought of it until a few weeks ago when I was trying to put words to a challenging situation in my personal life. I described to a friend that lately, life felt a lot like grasping around in the dark and crying out to God for help. I said, “I can’t see Him, but I know He is there. I feel like Christian walking through the Dark Valley.”

“The Dark Valley lay much lower than the Valley of Humiliation. It was narrow, and the black rocks seemed almost to meet over Christian’s head as he entered it. The evening was coming on, and the path was soon surrounded with a thick mist, so that he could scarcely see his hand when he stretched it out before him. Flashes of light kept breaking through the mist, but he did not know whether they were flames of fire or lightening, and the air was filled with terrible sounds, which made his heart beat fast with fear. By the light of the flames he saw that the path upon which he was walking was a very dangerous one. On his right hand there was a very deep hollow, and on his left a marsh, and it was all he could do to prevent himself from slipping into either one or the other.” – From Little Pilgrim’s Progress by Helen L. Taylor

The Dark Valley is of course The Valley of the Shadow of Death. Some days I have felt almost pressed to death due to difficult circumstances, but the more I am pressed, the more I pray. The more I pray, the more I read my Bible. The more I read my Bible, the more I am reminded that my King is powerful, he loves me, and I am never outside of his field of vision. When one enters the Dark Valley, one is overwhelmed by the sheer terror of it all, but once one cries out to God and experiences deliverance from a terrible fall, it becomes of place of indelible sweetness.

I was jogging the other day and listening to some verses when I heard something precious.

“There is none like God, O Jeshurun, who rides through the heavens to your help, through the skies in his majesty. The eternal God is your dwelling place, and underneath are the everlasting arms.” – Deuteronomy 33:26-27

These were some of the last words of Moses before he died as he sought to bless the Israelites before they entered Canaan, the land God promised to give them. Moses was not allowed to go into the land he had spent so long leading the people to, yet, He trusted the Lord for their deliverance.

God’s word has become so sweet to me. I have come to see that nothing else satisfies the soul the way the words in the Bible do. And not because they are just good words of affirmation or positive thoughts or good vibes, but because they are real and true. They testify to the realness of a God I cannot see but who ever lives to fill my heart with joy in the knowledge of Him.

Moses liked this turn of phrase which is why he repeats it in Psalm 90. “Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations.” And that is how I think of God now; my dwelling place. No matter how dark the days, how cold the nights, how bleak the future, “He is my rock, my fortress and my deliverer.” (Psalm 18)

“And now little Christian was comforted in his loneliness by hearing the voice of a pilgrim who was repeating aloud some of the beautiful words which were written in the King’s Book.”

Today if you are walking on a treacherous path, I pray that God will guide you to the Word that will quench your fears, lighten your darkness, and satisfy the deepest longings of your soul. His word is “Sweeter also than honey and drippings of the honeycomb.” (Psalm 19:10) May it fill you with joy and gladness of heart today–and every day.