When Enervating Emotions Elicit Evil impulses

The gloom descended in the form of cold, dark clouds. They swirled and filled the trees with menace. Not even the fearless mockingbird was unaffected. She flicked her tail nervously and hopped from branch to branch in a spindly tree. She flew to my right and then to my left as my feet crunched against the limestone gravel. We were alone–she and I. Caught in the frozen grasp of winter. Helpless against the frozen onslaught. Marching amid an impotent storm that was all bluster and no bite.

The mockingbird

I don’t understand the mockingbird. In the darkest moments of my life she is always there–singing. She flits between telephone poles and electric wires, over church spires and ramshackle houses. She calls to me with a hundred different songs and I am helpless to not respond. I whistle and I wait. This time, she does not respond.

I went to the park to absolve the evil impulses brooding in my body. Winter does something to my mood that is as complex as it is devastating. I don’t know if it is the shorter sun cycle, or the cold, or the repressed memory of feasts gone by, but the full fury of my food addiction rages like a wildfire and my only repose is to walk and pray.

But I am haunted by desire. My brain craves the sweet desserts of yesteryear. There are promises whispered and longings unfulfilled. Unbidden, the thoughts of my mother’s homemade fudge swirl to remembrance and I see myself at my worst–baking pan after pan to satisfy an insatiable craving. So I walk and I weep. I am as ashamed of the memory as I am for the desire. I am walking but I am secretly fighting the impulse to go to the store and purchase ingredients for a “good old fashioned binge.”

Have you ever faced such a temptation? How did you respond?

Early in my journey I adopted a phrase, “If hunger is not the problem, then eating is not the solution.” But I realize now–these many years later–that eating still wants to be the solution. Especially when enervating emotions descend.

I think of Joseph and the temptation to indulge in a tryst with Potiphar’s wife. I wonder if she was beautiful. I imagine it would have been no temptation at all had she been difficult to look at. Thus, he fled her presence–going so far as to leave his cloak in her grasping hands. In her humiliation she betrayed him to her husband and had him banished to prison. What were his thoughts then, I wonder? Were they anything like mine as I walk mile after mile to somehow try to avoid the evil impulses that grasp at me? Because the truth is, I would rather lie down with fudge than walk, but I have resolved not to sin against my God.

How long with that resolve sustain me?

By grace I have been saved and I shall be saved again. I endure soul hunger no piece of food can ever satisfy. So I pray and I wait. And I whistle at the mockingbird though she offers no reply. Because I believe the prayers of the righteous are powerful and effective as they are working. God knows I will probably always suffer these food furies, but he has promised that His grace will always be sufficient for me.

Today, if you are struggling with addiction, do not lose heart. You are not alone. We inhabit bodies riddled by sin and the war we fight to stay sober is brutally hellish. But we must not lay down our swords.

There is a song written by Charlie Chaplin that always comes to mind when I am fighting tears. It comes to mind now. Only instead of “Smile” I suggest we sing, “Fight!”