what God will do – Joyfully Clamoring

Today is a big day. A sweet anniversary. A year ago today God grabbed me and said “I have a better plan!” You see, I had asked him sorta “tongue and cheek” to just make me magically thin and fit after my sister declared on Facebook she was ready to lose weight and get healthy. I knew I needed to do the same thing….but the past 15 years had only proved to me how excruciatingly hard this was! So why not ask God for this little favor! I thought it would be an amazing thing for Him to do. I’d just wake up the next day and be 10 lbs lighter. And as I barely changed my eating habits and continued my crusade to never exercise a day in my life, I’d continue to lose weight like butter slipping off a hot steak. It would be spectacular! After this past year of talking to people on social media who are trying to lose weight, God could stay quite busy helping people achieve their own pre-laid quick weight loss plans! People get so agitated and discouraged if they don’t lose 5 lbs or more a week.

But I digress. Back to God’s better plan! I did truly pray for God to make losing some weight easier for me. I did hope I could lose at super fast lightning speed. Because who doesn’t? I knew,though, I needed a mindset change and that’s what I honestly prayed hardest for. Because I knew that if I woke up every day thinking it was OK to be the “fluffy grandma” , that cookies were life and that sitting on the sidelines watching life pass me by was cool, I’d never ever ever lose weight again. I had to have better thoughts passing through my head.

So I went to bed on February 28,2019 with this prayer on my heart. And when I opened my eyes on March 1st, something was different! No, I wasn’t amazed at my new size 10 body staring at me from my bathroom mirror. The size 20 girl was still there with all her bed head glory. But what lay beneath all that crazy hair was not the same! I can’t explain it beyond God’s miraculous touch, but I knew I knew I knew that all my “I can’t possibly do this” thoughts had left the building and would no longer be an issue.

Could I really “do all things through Christ who strengthens me”? I was about to find out….

So I grabbed my phone and purchased the WW app. I scoured through YouTube for all the Leslie Sansone Walk at Home videos I could find. I threw out all the sugary , yummy junk that was lingering in my pantry. I went to Kroger and filled my buggy with lean meats and fruits and veggies and all the healthy things I once snubbed my nose at. I joined my sister’s Facebook group with others who were trying to commit to new and healthier lifestyles…because accountability is a good thing. Then I set about the business of listening to what God’s better plan was and doing it.

My first big surprise was how easy it all felt . It wasn’t hard to hit play on the walking video and actually spend 30 minutes marching and kicking around my living room. It wasn’t hard to kick the cookies to the curb and eat blueberries instead. It wasn’t hard to tell people “no thank you” when they offered me a piece of cake because they knew I always wanted cake! None of it was hard. And that was weird and so amazing.

“The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; His mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning.”…Lamentations 3:22-23

Part of His better plan for me was to teach me this. His mercies truly never end. It’s been an every morning thing. I go to bed each night unaware of what the next day will bring. But God knows. So He wraps up the strength I’ll need to make healthy food choices all day. He boxes up the stamina I’ll need make it through the harder workouts. He ties up all the positive words I need to say to myself. Then when I wake up in the morning, He hands them all to me…a new gift each and every morning.

So by this point, you must be wondering if doing all these things with my new “Jesus super powers” made everything so super easy that I reached all my goals at the exact time I wanted to reach them and never struggled.

And the answer to that is a big fat nope!!! God promised His forever presence with us. But He never promised us His presence would make life super easy with every single thing going just like we want. Over the course of this last year , some things have happened exactly like I wanted them to….like losing 30 lbs in the 3 months before our fancy Alaskan cruise. The picture above of my husband and I was taken on that vacation. We were standing in our “adventure cart” on a mountain trail in Ketchikan, Alaska. SO! MUCH! BEAUTY! Let me just stop here and say if you ever have the chance to go to Alaska, don’t think twice about it. Just go! Best as I could figure, losing 30 lbs would be a reasonable 3 month goal and it would be just enough to make me more comfortable with all the vacation things we’d be doing. And I was right. By June 15th , I had lost 33.5 lbs. Because God sometimes like to show us how He is able to do abundantly more than all we ask or think, simply because He loves us.

After those first three months of abundance , I had new lessons to learn. And the biggest thing God had for me was wrapped up in the s l o w n e s s of the weight loss I would have for the remainder of the first year. I lost 33.5 in the first three months. Over the next NINE months ( and to this very day), I would lose only 32 more pounds. The tail end of my first year of weight watching was full of plateaus, roller coasters… gaining and losing the same 3 or 4 pounds over and over. I’m telling you, a weaker person would’ve just said “Hallelujah for those first 30 pounds but this is for the birds” and thrown in the towel.

Now I’m human. And even though I had given God control of this venture into “healthierness”…yes,that’s a word and I just made it up and it’s good…I still felt big needs to help Him speed things up when the wheels started screeching on my weight loss. So I changed my WW plan . I changed my exercise program.

And ya know what?

I kept losing weight! Yay me!!

You wanna also know what?

My efforts didn’t speed up a thing! Yep. In spite of all my incredible efforts to get to my goals and reach the end of this race quicker , I was still barely losing 1/2 a pound a week. What the heck was going on?? I had accepted the fact that I was gonna lose slowly because of my age and I was OK with that. But this just seemed excruciating. I needed to have another serious chat with my Leader about this.

It went something like this…..

Me: “Hey God! I know You’re for me and with me and all that but I’m just wondering if You , for some reason, have put my request to lose all this weight on Your back burner. I still have a good 15-20 to go and I’m not even losing a pound a week. This is gonna take forevah!!” (insert semi-frustrated grunt here)

God: “Take heart, Sweet Girl, and wait for me. Be strong. I am making you strong now. Don’t you feel that?”

Me: “Yes! I’m so much stronger. I DO feel that. Have You seen that I’m lifting heavier weights now? And I’m doing real burpees! I still can by pass the cookies and cake but even if I have just a bite, that sugar monster You helped me slay stays asleep!! Seriously!! But I really thought I’d be at my goal weight and coasting through maintenance by this point. I need help to not just grow tired of this!”

God: ” What you are doing is a good thing. You’ve made so many positive changes . Continue to use my strength to help you not grow weary in doing these good things. And at the proper time, you will reap the harvest of your efforts because you did not give up. Remember that My timing is perfect even when it’s not the same as what you’d like.”

Me: ” Oh I know!! I won’t forget that. But I’m still an impatient human, just like You created me. I also know to You a day is like a thousand years and that makes me a tad bit nervous! Please please please tell me I’ll reach my goals quicker than that!!”

God: “Stay faithful to the good things I’ve taught you this year. Let your perseverance finish its work . You don’t want to reach your goal prematurely. Let all you’ve learned and accomplished come to completion so that you won’t be lacking anything. When you feel frustrated , like you don’t know what you’re doing anymore, come to Me. I love to help. I won’t look down on you or think you’re weak. I’ll just help you. Ask boldly and then believe without a second thought that I will help you.”

Me: “So if I do these things I don’t see how I can help but reach my goals. In Your time and in Your way. I will wait patiently. I will stay steady and strong. One good decision after another. One at a time. “

And that my Friends, I guess is the secret to my success over this past year and into the years to come. By my own power , I’m a mess. With God leading the way, I at least stand a pretty darn good chance of getting what I truly need. Healthy weight loss….not super fast, at the speed of light loss. A mind set that is changed for the good and for the better because anything that is slowly simmered is superior to something quickly boiled into a mushy mess.

I’m still a work in progress and will continue to be.

Until next time, keep JOYFULLY CLAMORING!

We planned this move as a means to start over. Being 1000 miles away from all we knew was going to be our fresh start. The hurts from the past would be set aside and forgiven and we would move on…together. As I made the final arrangements to move myself and our two young children to meet him and start a new home and life together , I got the call. He wasn’t ready to make our marriage work and he would be coming home to finalize our divorce.

I was shattered.

It came as a text. They wouldn’t be needing my services any longer. As nice and cordial as the message was, it still stung. But when I got a similar message from another parent just a few days later, I was left empty. Even though children moving on is the “nature of the beast” of my business , I wasn’t expecting this to all hit at once and it hurt. To top things off, not only did I lose every penny of my income that week, so did my husband. How long could we keep food on our table and a roof over our heads with the little bit of savings we had? I knew it wouldn’t last long.

I was shattered.

Photo by Sebastian Voortman on Pexels.com

As I finished up Chapter 2 of “It’s Not Supposed to Be This Way”, I was challenged to think about times in my life that felt shattered to the point of dust. “Shattered to dust”…those times that felt like an abrupt, scary, disappointing end to the comforts I once felt. The times that felt like I could never pick up the pieces and move on. Because, well, once something is shattered to the point of dust, it’s a smidge impossible to glue those teeny, tiny fragments back together and make anything good.

Unless, of course, you’re God!

In the book, Lysa brought to our attention how magnificent God is with dust. Give God a handful of dust and He can create a living, breathing human being. I mean, come on. Creating a person with such ease should give us great comfort when we hand Him the dust created from our obliterated circumstances!

But I know how much easier it feels in the moment to just scream at God and come short of demanding that He fix things just the way we think would be best. I’ve been there, done that….

LORD! Make him love me again! Get him on a one way plane back home where he’ll stay and we’ll live happily ever after with our two kids and one dog. He’ll be faithful to me forever and I’ll never look like the black sheep of the family because I was the only one with a failed marriage! God, only You can do this, so do it now!

But God had other plans for my dust!

LORD! WHY?!? You know we can’t live without an income. I can’t even believe You made this happen to us. Why would you give me a calling in my life and rip it away with nothing to fall back on?? I have no clue what to do next! So God , You better lead me very clearly to the next step because I feel blinded here!!!!

But God had plans for my dust!

Did you ever watch David Letterman’s late night talk show? He would often have a segment he called ” Stupid Human Tricks” where people would do little “tricks” they taught themselves. Silly little old idiosyncratic crazy things they could probably make money showing off in bars! When we try to tell God what to do , or worse yet, jump ahead of him and start doing these things all on our own, I imagine He looks down on us from heaven , shakes His head and gets a little giggle at our silly “stupid human tricks”! Because try as we may, we can never ever create anything as fabulous out of the dust of our cruddy circumstances as God can. But we have to hand our crud over to Him and let Him do His thing!

Because God’s way is simply better.

“I don’t think the way you think. The way you work isn’t the way I work. God’s Decree. For as the sky soars high above earth, so the way I work surpasses the way you work, and the way I think is beyond the way you think.” … Isaiah 55:8-9 (The Message)

When I think back on these two times in my life when my circumstances felt crushed to dust, I can smile now knowing the truth of God’s declaration here. His ways ARE better! His thoughts for me ARE better! God took the dust of that broken marriage and did a new thing that never would’ve happened if I had stuck to my way of doing things and had not moved 1000 miles out of my comfort zone. God’s way gave me new confidence . His way showed me the rewards of obedience. His way showed me His heart and His great love for me. He drew me closer to Himself as He molded a new creation out of my dust. His way brought me new love, a new marriage with Him at the center and three sons I adore. God took the dust of our broken pay check and showed us how great His provision is, how perfect His timing is. He brought my husband a wonderful new career way closer to home. He brought me new children to love and care for. He showed me that even though I felt forsaken for a time, it was a lie. He never left our side or was ever unaware of what was happening.

He is simply good. He knows what to do when our lives are shattered to dust. My encouragement for you today if you are feeling shattered is to trust in His goodness , His love for you, and His timing in your situation. He knows what’s going on. He won’t take His eye off you. So mourn, mope, scream, do whatever you need to do to deal with the emotions but quickly shake off the dust. And let God create something new and magnificent with it.

If you have a story to share where God has turned your dust to glory, I’d love to hear it. I bet it would encourage someone else!

Oh but what God will do!!