Thanks for joining my journey through Lysa TerKeurst’s awesome book, Made to Crave. For my thoughts on other chapters, see here.
I found chapter 8 (Making peace with the realities of my body) to be very similar to chapter 7… I probably should have blogged them together, but too late for that!
Here are some of my favorites from this chapter…
First off, there is a hilarious story from high school, totally worth the price of the book just for the “tankles” story. J It’s a great example of how a girl’s heart can totally internalize someone else’s view of her and carry it for the rest of her life. We let the world (especially boys) be our mirror of beauty, value and worth.
“Yes, eating healthy and exercising get our bodies into better shape, but we are never supposed to get the satisfaction our souls desire from our looks. Our looks are temporary; if we hitch our souls to this fleeting pursuit, we’ll quickly become disillusioned.”
“The body God has given me is good. It’s not perfect nor will it ever be… But my body is a gift, a good gift for which I am thankful. Being faithful in taking care of this gift by walking according to God’s plans gives me renewed strength to keep a healthy view of my body.”
My thoughts about this chapter (even 6 months after I read it for the first time) are a bit confused. I relate to dissatisfaction with my body, and would never say I don’t have body image issues. But this chapter is about making peace with specific parts of your appearance, coming to terms with the fact that God made you this way. I don’t really have a “tankles” issue. I’d love to be taller, sure. And I’m not in love with the fact that I don’t have much of a neck, making me very prone to double (even triple) chins (I can’t believe I’m writing this on the internet! But I promised myself I’d be honest!)
But the main thing I’ve been dissatisfied with through the years is my weight – I’ve always felt big, or at least bigger than I ought to be. And since I have been slightly–to–really overweight for as long as I can remember, I don’t think you can really say that God made me this way. It is true that I am not designed to be a size 2, and I’m naturally curvy, God made me that way.
But He didn’t make me overweight – I got this way by using food for comfort and lacking self-control with certain foods. So I’m not sure how I’m supposed to make peace with my body. Maybe as I continue to lose weight and live in victory over my food issues, I’ll be able to “find my beautiful”, as Lysa talks about in this chapter? I definitely think that I have bigger issues with defining myself according to the scale (or in comparison with others) – rather than being dissatisfied with a particular aspect of my appearance.
Thoughts?
Renee, I’m not sure how much sense this will make, but I’m going to give it my best shot … Here are my thoughts:
A few days ago I got to hear my dad give a basic genetics lecture. I LOVE the concept of genetics because it is a perfect example of the fact that God is more in control that I can possibly realize, in ways that I could not dream up in any amount of spare time. Long story short … my dad talked about different patterns of inheritance. Basically, different traits and/or disorders are inherited in different ways through different mechanisms. But all in all, everything from our height to our weight, to our freckles and our predisposition for cancer(s) is GENETIC. Weight in particular (though we have some control in extreme circumstances) is determined by what is called “genetic imprinting”. In other words, the physiology of your mother at the time she was originally developing her eggs, and the environmental exposures she had in the womb, helped to largely determine your weight. That blows my mind!
My slant on this, or what I took away from it was this: I felt such a sweet release knowing that though “all things are permissible though not all are beneficial”, I only have so much control in determining who I have been crafted to become since the beginning of time. I see God’s grace in every reality of genetics, etc. because it tells me that his grace covers me, shapes, me, and is wide enough, long enough, deep enough, and high enough for me to rest in in the midst of this crazy world. I am not as much in control as I think I am. I am not required to carry with me dissatisfaction or guilt for things that I did NOT put into motion. I am privileged to only understand in part, and worship the one who knows all things in full.
I love you, and I hope this made some amount of sense. Praise the Lord for who we are even in this very moment!
Hey Lauren! I got your comment when I was on vacation & just realized I’d never told you how HELPFUL it has been to me. It’s really provoked my thinking in many ways! I think for me – there is freedom in knowing that some things are out of my control. But I also know that at least part of my weight is because I have shown no self-control. I’d like to learn to exercise self-control (for His sake, and for mine), and leave my weight in His hands.
I haven’t commented on this book yet but have been following along with interest; I know I have lots of issues with food and discipline and emotional eating so it definitely all applies to me. This chapter sounds particularly interesting to me because some of my “aha!” moments in recent years about exercise and food have come when I’ve realized that I basically walk around as a Platonic dualist or a gnostic, thinking my spiritual self is important but my body isn’t. The quote you have there about my body being a gift from God, about it being good, is related, I think, to what has woken me up from that gnosticism to some level. I still have a ton of stuff to deal with, of course, but for me these are core ideas to addressing health/body/weight issues.