Posted on

Sit. Still. Settle.

Do you ever hear yourself saying something that one of your parents would have said to you? There’s often a mixture of horror that you are turning into one of your parents and a realisation of why it was that they said it in the first place.

I was sat with Sully on the stairs, actually i was sat on the stairs semi hiding from the children who were watching trying to read some more of my book, but i digress. Sully came and climbed onto my lap. He snuggled in for a cuddle and then shifted position and snuggled differently, then he knelt up and tried another position, bumped his head, got frustrated and then tried another position. To say that it was irritating would be an understatement.

I found myself exclaiming “if you are having a cuddle would you just sit still and settle”. He settled into the original position he had been in, snuggled in and had a good long cuddle.

As we sat cuddling I felt one fo those God nudges that said “That’s what I’m trying to say to you” and so I stopped and I thought for a few moments about what I had said:

“Sit still and settle”

Sit. Still. Settle.

For a number of months I have been avoiding just stopping and sitting with God. I occasionally set out to spend time with Him but I fidget, get distracted, DO something instead of just BEING with Him but I don’t just sit with Him and rest in His arms.

The thing is that it’s really hard to just sit with God at the best of times. It’s an even harder thing to do when life is tough, when your heart is broken, when you’re filled with grief and when you don’t understand the segments of your life.

Pain makes stopping and sitting with God so hard. It means coming face to face with the fact that the realitiies of your life don’t match up with the goodness of God. It draws your heart to the fact that you don’t feel that goodness and it doesn’t feel like God is in your reality. That’s a painful place to sit.

What’s even more ridiculous is that I know if I were to make the effort to BE with God I would find that those two conflicting states would become less conflicting. God’s peace would become a reality and that pain would be experienced in the presence of a loving God not on my own.

So God wants me to just sit and stop fidgeting… not an easy call but if it’s something God is calling me to, it’s probably for a good reason.

Posted on

Back to square one

Where’s your head at? That questions always makes me think of Basement Jaxx song and the advert Pringles advert…

But the question is where’s my head at?!

I’ve been having a fight with myself and have been for about 2.5-3 months. The fight is about weight loss and discipline and sticking to what I want to do not doing as Paul says in Romans 7:15:

I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.

I start each day (well most days) with the best of intention to stick to my calories and this week I am going to lose weight and get back on it and be amazing. And then dinner time I’ve eaten something which puts me over my allowance or I get to the evening and I am tired and so I look for something to eat as if somehow that will make me not tired anymore…! The break in America became the month of May not being the end of the world, became fighting to get through June and now nearing the end of July I am just 0.4lb lighter than 2 days before we flew to America four whole months ago.

It’s crazy because it upsets me but I don’t chose to REALLY do something about it which has been the problem for years. It’s not the plan that’s the problem, it’s me.

I’ve debated changing my goal weight, there was nothing really special about 5.5 stone except that it would make me just overweight not obese. I’ve debated just settling where I am but I’m not sure I could find proper peace in that choice. I do not expect the world to just full in place and become happiness and rainbows at my target weight but I feel peaceful that at that weight I will be able to be more at peace with my achievements until I am ready to fight the final 2 stone off – the LOOOOONG term goal!

I’ve tried going back to basics with losing weight and it hasn’t worked. So now I’m going back to different basics. I’ve gone back to reading Lysa TerKeurst’s book Made to Crave and am trying to get a new, more God focused, perspective on the weight loss journey. I’m exhausted from trying to do it in my own strength and feel despair about my lack of progress and so at rock bottom I crawl back to God and ask Him to help me again.

As I go through the questions in the personal reflections I time and time again find that I am saying that my struggle is that making God a part of my every day life is not my habit. That asking Him for help is not my habit. That remember He CAN help is not my habit and find myself frustrated that I don’t really know how to make it habit.

There are positives in this situation. Although I have not lost I have mostly maintained my weight around the same point. A few gains and losses means I have not spiralled and let the weight go back on in frustration at the lack of progress and the disbelief, whether conscious or unconscious, that I am not worth all this time and effort. For those who know that is a MASSIVE change. That spiralling is the reason I spent 6 years on Slimming World gaining and losing the same 1.5 stone without every really making progress.

Also positive is that I recognise the need to change. That sitting in this frustration is not healthy and that I need to get myself to my target to release myself from  it by getting to my target.

It’s time to get more serious about making this journey one where I rely on God and hopefully then make progress to meet my goals BUT more importantly I hopefully will develop my relationship with God opening myself up more to hearing from Him, being more aware of His presence and the feel more of the push from Him to take chance and move forward in all areas of life.

Posted on

The heart knowledge 

Have you seen the film frozen? Brace yourself but I haven’t… it’s worse because we own it but haven’t actually watched it! 🤦🏼‍♀️  I do however feeel like I’ve seen it given how many of the songs I know and how much of the storyline I know!

This isn’t a completely random thought it’s linked to the continuance of the topic nagging, maybe I shall call it God nagging?! But I’ll get to that in a second – just thought I should confess my lack of Frozen viewing with you before I continue!

We established I have the head knowledge for a renewing of my mind just not the feeling, the heart knowledge.

It’s something that feels too big for me to find the solution to. In fact I think this is often the point that I get to in the topic when it crops up. Knowing what I need to know but not feeling it and not knowing how to move forward to feel it.

As I ran this afternoon I listened to a talk on love and came back to a statement about really struggle with.

Susie who was speaking said: “The secret to loving people and doing relationships well is being loved my God” She then quoted Tim Keller: “Before love is a behaviour, love is an experience. We have to be captured by that love, shattered by that love and only then can it empower us to love”.

What I struggle with in this statement is that I don’t feel that I know I am loved and worth the effort etc BUT I do feel that I know how to love others. Seriously my brain really struggles because the statement when it comes up time and time again makes me doubt my love for others. Either I am loving wrong or am loving from the wrong place. OR I have felt loved by God at times and that’s enough to enable me to love people well? OR loving people would be easier if I lived loved? You’ll be sensing my confusing on the subject I suspect!!

I don’t know that answer.

I read a Proverbs 31 Ministries devotional this morning that touched on this subject. The writer was communicating on Galations 5:1 and how we are free because of Christ and that we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be burdened by things because of that.

THIS is where the Frozen reference will start to make some sense. As I read the devotional it talked about how we slip into habits of pain or frustration and that even once the pain is gone we continue to feel it. God has taken away the ‘issues’ in life by dying on the cross for us but we often limp around as if we are still holding them. We need to let go of the past and walk without the limp.

I’m pretty sure that my past is what puts up all the road blocks to me living loved and knowing and experiencing just how loved I am. I’m pretty that I need to Let It Go as the song would say because that is what the bible calls me to do.

Nothing complicated or anything!!!!! I just need to let go of things and learn to live loved…..

Just don’t know how to get past a life time of past and move forward without the baggage holding on and holding me down.

Posted on

Like learning to ride a bike

Have you ever tried to teach someone to ride a bike? I hadn’t really until today.

We got our three year old a bike with stabilisers for giving up his dummy and so we now start the process of learning how to do it. He happily asks to have the bike out from the garage, puts on the helmet, climbs on the bike and then he just sits on with his feet on the pedals going nowhere fast, or at all to be honest!!

I tried to help. It wasn’t pretty. It was the end of a long day with the kids and my patience was low, maybe bike riding should not be a post 6pm activity! Anyway he would put his feet on the pedal and push one foot down and start to move which sounds and looks promising. He would then take his foot off the pedal that he next needed to push to keep moving. He would lose the flow and he would have to start again.

It did not matter how many times I would tell him that he needed to keep his feet on the pedal, he would still keep taking that foot off and that lead to me getting more and more frustrated with him, losing my patience, raising my voice slightly, all the usual ugly moments you wish you could go back and change.

After a little while of attempting this and repeating the phrase you need to keep your foot on the pedal to no avail, my lovely husband came outside and I exclaimed “I just need to go inside for a few moments!”

As I sat down exacerbated by really quite a short exchange I just felt God say “that’s what you do”. And as I thought about it I realised it is in so many situations. I request to do something, get all kitted out for it, get lined up to start, take a small motion towards it and then I take my foot off the pedal and God’s somewhere in the background shouting “STOP TAKING YOUR FOOT OFF THE FLIPPING PEDAL” – to be fair He probably isn’t shouting that but in my head that’s what I think he is shouting.

It’s so easy to lose momentum. Something gets hard. Something is boring. Something is frustrating, The weather changes. You get injured. People distract you. Life gets in the way. Another ‘thing’ needs our attention and it seems more important. Priorities get confused.

The thing is that I am sure that there are things in everyone’s life where we keep coming back to that very same issue, and keep making a start and then taking our feet off the pedal without even really meaning to sometimes. If you keep going round in the circle to the same situation chances are you keep starting and then stopping.

I can think of a few things where I do this but weight loss is the most obvious. It’s easily been 10 years of starting and stopping. Getting distracted, giving up, life causing issues, children. I’ve all the excuses in the world and many of them are justified but for me weight is an issue. It’s something that need to be dealt with. It’s a physical, emotional and spiritual area of my life which needs me discipline, attention and effort. I need to keep my foot on the pedal.
I’m doing better with this. I’ve got further than ever before but my mojo has disappeared a little. My discipline is lacking. My focus fuzz. My attraction to chocolate stronger. I need to spend time getting back that self control and discipline so that God doesn’t have to keep shouting to me about my feet on the pedals! I can’t do it alone but I’m so blessed to have friends and family who have my back and maybe I need to start by asking for help!

Keep your feet on the pedals because you never know just what you might achieve if you stop pulling it off at the most important moment. Just imagine the progress and then maybe gaffa tape your feet onto the pedal which I will confess was what I was tempted to do with the three year old!