If we were sitting across from each other at my kitchen table, it would be different.
I would tell you all the things I won’t put in a blog post about this food challenge. Some personal reasons I’ve never felt better. The way body image and food are such charged topics and the messy history I have with both. How truly scary it is to lose weight and hope it doesn’t also mean losing friends or respect or trust.
We would talk about how messed up our culture is on the subject of eating and diets and beauty. How easy it is to stress eat and how bonding it is to talk about ways we’ve blown it. But how gluttony is still not okay with God. I would ask you questions about ways you use food or clothes or humor to hide. Ways it feels scary to change or go against the tide or join the tide if it’s healthier and more God honoring than ignoring it.
We would likely share some pain. How we’ve been wounded around this subject. Not because anyone else is in charge of our heart but because we are part of the human race and we aren’t always careful with each other’s sorrow. We’d probably talk about how much we don’t want to compete or compare, no matter how much our culture encourages it. Because no one gets anywhere like that.
I would try to hold your truth carefully. I think you would with mine, too. Because we all have something. A place we struggle and a past that visits. He designed it that way, we’d remind ourselves. So we learn to cling to Him.
Yeah, it’s about more than food. And it’d be different if we were face to face.