Me and My Scale

You should have seen me frantically searching the house for it. On my hands and knees, looking under every couch and chair, opening every crevice where my husband may have hidden it…finally huffing and puffing and dragging a kitchen table chair over to the cupboards climbing up and searching for it on tippy toes, straining my neck up to find it. There she was! Sitting so pretty on the top of the cabinets. I found her!

I have a neurotic relationship with my scale. Perhaps that is an understatement.

Just so you don’t think ill of my husband, I had asked him to hide that thing. At the end of last year, I started a healthy eating and exercise plan (again…) and have seen some pretty encouraging results. The first few come off fast for me…thank God, but then things start to even out a bit and the loss gets a little more snail-paced. I know. I know.  This is “healthy” and “normal” and “to be expected” but I want it NOW. I am an American Girl after all. I should see IMMEDIATE results to my valiant efforts. Sigh.

I have come to understand that, in prophetic terms, my scale has become quite the idol.

I look to it to validate me. What is says makes me either feel happy or sad, victorious or defeated, inspired or discouraged. How loopy is that? An inanimate object that has no life or power in it, and yet it has this hold on me. It feels crazy, but it is often my reality.

I could be making all these empowering, life-giving choices—eating well, exercising, and drinking tons of water. I could be living free from my addiction. I could be fueling my body with food rather than using it to exit whatever pain I might be carrying at the moment. Rather than using it to soothe, to comfort, to alleviate frustration or to go numb, I could be living FREE…Then I step on the scale, and because it doesn’t say what I want it to say, I am derailed, undone, completely obsessed with a number.

Insta-bondage.

It seems ridiculous when I see it in black and white. But it is my reality.

I have been leading a group of women through a Bible Study taking us through the book of Jeremiah. Idolatry—following gods other than the One True God—well that’s what put these people into slavery. Literal slavery. God’s people became owned by other people. They would go find wood, and form a god with their own hands, and bow down to it. Sounds crazy and I get all judgey when I think about them doing this. How ridiculous! How small-minded! How childish! But I am JUST as crazy as that, when I find myself enslaved to the square-shaped black thing on my bathroom floor.

The few days that my scale was “found” were difficult ones for me. I looked to it for my sense of value, my sense of success. What it said informed not only what I would eat, but would set the tone for the few hours post-weigh. I found myself on the roller coaster ride of, “Why try?” to “Try harder!” This is misery, obsession, SLAVERY.

The scale is hidden again (I asked Doug to make it a little more difficult to find) and I am sensing that freedom has come again.

Danna Demetre says, “Do the right things for the right reasons, and trust God for the results.” This is so freeing. My healthy eating plan is not about a number on a scale, it’s about living in freedom from anything that holds me back from loving my God with all my heart, soul, mind and strength.

Is there anything in your life that has power over you in a way that is keeping you enslaved?

“It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.” Galatians 5:1

Living FREE,

Christy

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