Waking Up Me!

For many of us, a diet has come to represent the verb form of the word rather than the noun ( dictionary.com ): Noun:  The kinds of food that a person, animal, or community habitually eats. Verb:  Restrict oneself to small amounts or special kinds of food in order to lose weight. The noun form is what we should be doing to live this life of ours and the verb form is the act of doing that. Yesterday, I started what is referred to as eating clean. Eating in this way was not  but Tosca Reno who is the author of The Eat-Clean Diet,  The Eat-Clean Diet  Recharged,  The Eat-Clean Diet  Stripped, and cookbooks featuring recipes for this lifestyle as well. As she states on her website about the "diet" : " Eating Clean is not a fad; it’s a way of life. " So many so-called diets are not lifestyles, but are ways to drop weight which is only a short-term fix.  If you are an emotional eater like me, you may be bound to being a yo-yo dieter who loses and ga...

On many mornings, I wake with a song playing in my head. Lately, it's Christian songs. This morning,  I woke to a song in my head that isn't in my collection, but was one we'd sung at church. I know this because I can hear it in my head as if our worship leader, Jessica, is singing it. The verses running in my head are in snippets: "I'll wait for you..."      "You're all I'm living for..."             "I'm falling on my knees..." I google the verses looking for the song and listening to videos to see if I can find the song. The first two bring me Christian song responses, but aren't right. Then, I find it. The song is, "Hungry (Falling on My Knees)". It is exactly what I am. I am hungry. I hunger for Jesus. I hunger to know him. I feed that hunger with food and people and desires and work...all the things that still leave me  wanting for  more because I am not giving myself what I am really looking for,...

All day today--and for so long before this that I can't even tell you when it first began--God has been trying to get me to let go. To trust him. To turn to him. To embrace his Truth. Lysa TerKeurst who is the President and co-founder of Proverbs 31 Ministry as well as the NYT Best Selling author of Made to Crave which is a book I am reading about "satisfying your deepest desire with God and not food", writes things that speak to me. I have read her book "Becoming More Than a Good Bible Study Girl" (which I am ALL about!) and "What Happens When Women Walk in Faith" (okay, I didn't finish this one because it required work my heart wasn't yet ready to do and my mind wasn't ready to wrap around it yet). Lysa speaks with honesty and truth--from the Bible and her real life. She isn't perfect and doesn't pretend to be. I like real because I can relate. It reminds me that I don't have to be perfect to live by God's grace and mer...