A woman said to me today, “Well, I guess I just need to figure out what my wrong beliefs are and search for the scriptures that are the truth.”
I cringed.
And then I replied, “I think God is shepherding you in a way that you’ll realize that he wants to show you where your beliefs are off and what the actual truth is. Before you start figuring yourself out, I hope you’ll ask God to speak to you personally.”
Yes, we can probably make some educated guesses about what erroneous beliefs may be motivating our overeating, but doesn’t God already know?
The problem is that we just aren’t sure God will really show us, that he’ll actually speak to us.
“Lisa,” a Weight of Grace group participant once complained she’d sincerely prayed that God would show her what was motivating her to stay larger than was natural for her, but she did not at all perceive God saying anything to her about that. She said she had been distracted lately because she’d been especially missing her mother, who had died a few years before. Lisa had been looking at a photo of her mother, who had been a pleasantly stocky woman. When she started to put the photo into her wallet, she saw her own driver’s license, which she’d recently renewed. She was particularly struck by how very much she now looked like her mother! Lisa had previously mentioned that she hadn’t really started to gain weight until after her mother died. Several of the group members exclaimed, “You miss your mother so much that you want to look just like her!” Lisa wept and said, “Whenever I look in the mirror, I see Mom.” God used women in this small group to speak to Lisa very personally about what was at the heart of her weight gain. Now Lisa could ask God if he wanted her to honor and remember he mother in other ways or if staying larger was a good way to do that.
God is very interested in personally communicating to you.