The Space Between

I looked around at twenty-five or so little blurred faces that I'm sure were registering everything from worry to disgust. I was a substitute teacher trying to play a song on a CD player for the class...except the CD was a really messy hamburger and it would not play. Jennifer Lopez assured me that it would...in fact she was standing right there telling me I was doing it wrong. I looked down and saw mayonnaise and ketchup oozing out of this unreasonably saucy sandwich and I thought "Why isn't this working?" and then it happened...

I travelled from this impossible situation to that place, the space between asleep and awake, and I heard a voice say two words..."My love." Then it was over and I was wide awake. 

My room was dark because it was too early to get up. I should have slept for at least another hour. I knew I couldn't go back to sleep though because I was supposed to reach out to the one who called me His love. I began some feeble prayers, fuzzy from their drowsy half formed origin in my brain. A friend's name came to mind, then another but these were not the eloquent, thorough prayers of a devout little prayer warrior.

I hopped up and relocated to my living room couch and gently tried again. The prayers were as weak as the shadowy dawn, slowly growing outside. After a while I had nothing left to say. God must be really disappointed in me I thought, like those guys in the garden who would rather be asleep. Still it had been a while since I was up early and praying.

The next day as I was chatting with my sister about something else entirely she reminded me that even if I did nothing for the Lord my whole life He was still crazy about me and that is when it hit me. I had missed the whole message of waking up early that morning. It wasn't about me trying not to fail Him and making my prayers acceptable...it wasn't about anything I did or did not do. It was all about what He said to me. 

He called me "My love". He called me His! He said He loved me! God woke me up and called me His own beloved. I could have sat there in darkness and done nothing but know that and it would have been enough. I was so busy to fulfill my christian duty that I forgot to take delight in Christ.

I feel sometimes life seems almost as impossible as my burger CD player dream leaving me saying "Why isn't this working?". I know that if I could live in that elusive space of hearing God and believing He loves me I wouldn't be so frustrated.

Changed

     At the urging of my very much revered, tech savvy sister, I am journalling via blog for the very first time. Far be it from me to turn my nose up at the wonderful tools available to me in this brave new digital age. I am a pencil to paper kind of girl for the most part but here I choose to avail myself of the accountability of this particular way of chronicling my progress as I forge my way ahead. You see I want do this in a new way because I want to be new. I need to be different. I am trying to change.
   
     I confess that I am not  faithful in journalling and have never been able to get a few days beyond New Years Day without breaking my resolutions and good intentions of writing my thoughts down everyday. Changing habits is very hard when one is so inconsistent. I am however hopeful because for the last month I have been able to consistently change something that has ruled over me for most of my life. I have always struggled with my weight.

     I have not always been heavy but I have, almost as far back as I can remember, been unhappy with my body. I've lived my whole life never thin enough and never pretty. Nothing is so wearying as constantly looking at yourself and never just being comfortable with her. I have wasted enough time being obsessed with how I don't look so now I am determined to get over it.

     Ever since I got married and became a mom my life has drastically changed (no....really? I am SHOCKED!) Seriously though, that is when I changed very rapidly into someone who was active and strong to a weak, pajama clad mush mom. I now have a seven year old boy and he is leaving me in the dust. That means for seven years I have stopped. My focus has been on taking care of him but that isn't working as an excuse anymore.

     Now back to the "change". For the past month I have changed one thing...what I put into my body for fuel. My aforementioned awesome sister had been encouraging me for some time to try to change the way I ate. I knew I needed to eat less and to workout more but this is really harder than it sounds. My Sister introduced me to the "Caveman Diet" and gave me a cookbook by a blogger she followed. Before I tried it the diet sounded crazy to me. I couldn't eat grains, dairy, soy, legumes, potatoes, sugar or anything processed.  What in the world could I eat? The answer was lots and lots of really great tasting and interesting things.

     So far I have been able to stick to this new way of feeding myself for over a month (kind of a miracle) and I have lost ten-ish pounds. This may seem like a small thing to many but to me it is amazing. I am actually proud of myself which is such a different feeling than my normal self-loathing. I really feel like something has changed forever.

     This blog is my attempt to keep track of the feelings and thoughts that are growing and changing in my life. My challenge to myself is to not be a mush mom anymore but to train myself to do what is right for my body, my mind and my spirit. So here it goes...