Bought and Paid for….

When I started this blog, my initial intention was to give me a place to chronicle my food battle. And it is a battle. I fight the same pounds year after year, finding victory over 15 or 20 only to succumb to the strain of constant warfare and realize suddenly that they’ve all crept back on - plus one or two. I’d tried before and failed and thought “Okay. So THIS is REALLY it this time. I’m going to TALK about it. Battle it in the public eye” (or at least the 7-10 eyes I told about this little foray into blog-dom) thinking that if I was “out there” about it, it would encourage me to be more successful.

 

But I failed - again. I ate more, wrote less and now, here I am within 2 pounds of my all-time high wondering why I can’t find that inner-crossfit-goddess that surely lives somewhere under these dimpled thighs and jiggly upper arms. 

 

I really, really hate the body that looks back at me in the mirror every day.

 

But apparently I hate the discipline of exercise and healthy eating more.

 

What a conundrum.

 

And so here I am, back at my keyboard, tap-tap-tapping away and wondering if I can flap my arms up and down (while typing) with enough vigor to burn the calories from the blueberry muffin I ate for breakfast. 

 

I’m not sure WHY this continues to be such a struggle for me. I’ve analyzed my behavior, identified my issues and many of the solutions, yet I struggle with flipping the switch that perpetuates a real transformation. I long for freedom, and yet I continue to intentionally walk right back into the prison of my own appetites by choosing poorly, or perhaps over-indulging when the choice is healthy. Sometimes I feel so broken and frustrated by my failures, I want to just give up and resign myself to life in the double-digit sizes..

 

You are not your own, for you were bought with a price

Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.   1 Corinthians 6:19-20 

I read this verse and it hit me as a sharp blow to the chest. I’ve read it before, many, many times, focused on the notion of my body as a temple and guiltily recognizing that I’ve often been eating as if the Holy Spirit’s indwelling required that I eat for both of us. It has been enough to make me feel wretched about myself, but after a few days (weeks) of reformation I slip back into old habits. This time, however my focus was elsewhere:

 

You are not your own, for you were bought with a price.

 

Imagine you are in desperate need of a car. You are unable to buy one on your own and so you’ve struggled along, catching rides when possible and doing the best you can to organize your life around those who can take you where you need to go and your limited access to public transportation.  

 

Then imagine that one day someone buys you a car, and not just a car but a really, really nice $40,000 car. It is more than just a way to get from point A to point B, it is luxurious and comfortable and far more than you ever could have purchased on your own.  Suddenly a trip to the grocery store takes a fraction of the time it used to. You can make appointments without considering anyone else’s calendar. You are independent.  You are free!

 

But you don’t take care of the car – in fact, quite the opposite. The back end is crushed in from the day you carelessly backed into a tree. The front end is smashed, as well, from another time when you were parking and didn’t slow down enough to avoid hitting a retaining wall. One of the side mirrors is missing, though you can’t really remember what happened to it. The inside is littered with garbage and the seats are stained and sticky from spilled drinks. The map pockets have been used as ashtrays by your friends and the visors have been torn off. The floormats were discarded long ago and the carpets are filthy.  

 

One afternoon you come out of the grocery store to find someone standing next to your car and he is staring in stunned silence. It is the man who had bought you the car just a year before and he can’t believe that this wreck is the car he purchased for you, a car he bought at considerable cost to himself. He bought you something he knew you could never afford on your own because he cared so deeply for you, and he gave up some of his own wants in order to do so. He’d used his vacation fund for the down payment and had sacrificed meals out, cable TV and traded his own luxury car for a less expensive model in order to afford the car he’d purchased for you. And now he stands looking at what is left of this extravagant gift and wonders what happened.

 

What kind of a person would take such a generous gift and be so careless with it? Who could be so thoughtless and disrespectful of the sacrifice made to provide it? I’m sure we’ve all seen generosity abused and most of us would bristle at an abuse of this magnitude.

Bought with a price.  

My redemption cost Christ His life. My redeemed life is both soul and body. As I consider that I am no longer my own and seek to glorify God in my body, as Paul directs, I realize that it is not simply the care I take of my soul and the relationship I seek with Jesus, but also my body in that it is by this body that I am able to live out my faith in practical ways. When I don’t take care of my body it limits my availability to be Jesus to those around me. And it is profoundly disrespectful to this amazing gift that God has given me.
 

And so I choose to continue the battle against my appetite. I choose to continue the battle to move my body rather than sleep in.  I chose to honor God with my choices because I was bought with a price.