I just finished reading my book.  You can check the link, but the basic premise is a woman who is a writer and writes a "weight loss diary" column for a fitness magazine, and all she goes through.

A lot of stuff she wrote- lines I can't remember in the fuzz that is my exhausted brain- is really poignant and penetrating.  She penned lines I wish were my own, so moving they were.

I'm sorry if this spoils it for anyone, but I'm really disappointed.  I read about her amazing progress and how great she was doing and I was encouraged, as I read those parts in recent weeks, by her.  "I can do this too!" kind of stuff.  But then she starts to slip back into bad, bad habits.  She's basically a binger (but not a purger) and she has so many issues that pile up and I kept waiting for her to see the light, to finally latch onto something real.  Basically, to snap out of it.

I was angry with her, wanting to be like, "What is your problem?  Just don't go to the CVS and buy food.  Tell people when they say hurtful things or are a constant drain on your efforts to get your life together."  I am, of course, the ultimate hypocrite.  I don't want to know the number of people who have thought, "Seriously, Tami, freaking eh!  Just get off your butt and go for a walk.  Don't buy ice cream.  Don't eat when you're not hungry, and, seriously, stop making excuses all the time."  Some of you have probably had these thoughts, and I don't blame you if you have.

The thing is, though, she never snapped out of it.  She's still fumbling around in the dark, with minimal clarity for all of her struggles, and I can't find anything about her to know how she's doing now (the last update she wrote in the book was 6 years ago, and she wasn't really any better then) and it's so annoying to me.

In the bathroom just now, having finished the book and getting ready for bed, I was thinking about how angry I was.  With her.  Why was she so hopeless?  Why couldn't she ever get it together?

And then I realized that without Jesus, no one ever really gets it together.  I know plenty of people lose weight and keep it off (and many lose weight and gain it back), but this reminds me of the sadness I feel when I read other weight loss blogs and there's an emptiness there, a belief that losing weight and fixing one's problems suddenly makes life good.  Far too many times I believe this lie.  Call it closed-minded or arrogant but I submit to you that not one person who is alive or who ever has lived has been able to find real, true, deeply satisfying and lasting peace in their existence who was without relationship with Jesus.

Sure, plenty of people with Jesus are all sorts of jacked up- myself included.  But for me this is not an issue of earning worth, or being happy because I'm not fat anymore.  It's an issue of no longer being dead in my sins as I walk around this world drinking sewage water from broken cisterns.  The discipline I am building into my life as a result of obedience to Jesus is not solely so I can lose weight or have a clean apartment or have more money as a result of better spending habits or feel more "together".  Rather, it's so that I can steward all that He has blessed me with, so that my life is about Him, and, in turn, others, and not so much about me anymore.

I pray that I would be a blessing to others, that somehow from my depravity and failures and utter worthlessness Jesus could reach out to others and draw them in.  I want that not a single woman more would base her value on the numbers on the scale.  They'll never satisfy.  A woman at her goal weight still frets constantly, for fear that she'll gain and have to get back.  A woman in obedience to Jesus is free to find joy in dropping numbers on the scale but to ultimately care about what her relationship with Christ has been like, if she's been obedient and stewarding out of worship, and the numbers are merely numbers and not a reflection of her worth.

These are words I need to remember and cling to when temptation and, though I pray they stay far away, the inevitable slip-ups come.