Time is momentary and manmade, yet develops growth and healing from the past, utilizing the present to allow for opportunities.
Time is transient.
Here for a moment, and then gone. Only a memory.
For a year straight in my mortal life, I held to the belief that I was good at and good for nothing more than starving myself, gorging myself, and emptying myself (Keyword - myself. All sin is linked back to pride.) It is the most harmful and deceitful lie I have ever known. Right now, I’m believing it again. I don’t know when I will know the truth in its full. But you know what?
That year is gone. Gone. Here for a moment. I can’t go back. I have memories of it, but they are few and fuzzy and I’m not fond of them. I can’t change that.
“I looked back at 12 years and said, ‘What do I remember?’ I remember sitting at tables. I remember going to Thanksgiving dinners with pre-packaged meals for me. I had to just sit at the table, with other people, eating MY food, while everybody else was enjoying Thanksgiving. It was embarassing and it was shameful. And now I’m 28 and I’m a little girl with no period. And my boyfriend said to me, ‘I want to spend the rest of my life with you, but at the rate we’re going I’m gonna bury you in five years.”
(in the Thin documentary there is a part that got me thinking about this blog topic in which a therapist asks a 28-year-old girl, in order to support another teenage patient, what her life would have been like if she had gotten help earlier. She emotionally explains her incredible longing for a life outside of her eating disorder, followed by other women’s input. This segment can be found starting at 8 minutes of this clip and the beginning of this one, but I would recommend the entire film TO ANYONE WHO IS AT A STRONG ENOUGH PLACE TO WATCH IT.)
Right now I am fully aware that these years of mine are being consumed and eaten away by the very things I have done recently, am doing now, and will do soon. I know that I will not be able to go back. I know, that in the future I will sit my daughters down and say to them, “Don’t do what Mommy did. Because those years, you know, they’re gone, and they were wasted. I can’t go back. I want you to feel alive during your middle school, high school, college days. I want you to take each year differently for what it is. I want you to embrace the freedom that Jesus bought for you at the very moment you can understand it. Okay?”
I will tell them, that there was never a moment throughout my struggles in which I was at all unaware of what I was doing to my life and my body and my mind and my soul and my God. Because it’s true.
But alas, addictions are strong, and they’re powerful. I know a lot of people use that as an excuse all the time. They say “well it’s not my fault that I’m bingeing or purging or restricting (or drinking, or cutting, or whatever). It’s my eating disorder (or other addiction). I can’t control it.” That tactic is not right. But the statement is true.
This is my story.
Think about this (though I wouldn’t be surprised if you haven’t already, I’ve mused on it a few times): This moment, right now, is your present. Now it’s your past. Gone forever. There will never again be another January 5, 2011. Ever.
I wonder what it will be like on the day when I say,
“Yes God, I think I am fat and that bothers me immensely. I hate every fiber of my being and I don’t understand at all how You could love me. I have psychological impairments that I’ve had my entire life. I’ve made an idol out of food but yet, I am frankly terrified by it. All of this could give me great reason to murder myself with an eating disorder. But You, God, You are the only exception.”
“I know the end of the story, I’ll come out from the wilderness leaning on my Beloved.” (yeah okay I put something from IHOP.)
