peanut M&M craving

FROM "A LESSON LEARNED"
Have you ever been on a diet? If you have, then memories of said diet (or diets!) are now flooding back into your mind. You are remembering saying to yourself EVERY weekend "OK. Monday I am going to start eating better..." only to be pulling through the McDonald's drive thru by Wednesday. You are remembering that last minute "stuff" the night before you start a new diet wherein you sample on of everything in your kitchen cabinet and fridge just to make sure you don't miss out on anything before you give up everything. And, perhaps, you are remembering the smell of a frozen pizza that your husband is cooking at 11PM while you jealously sit on the sofa eating your 99% fat free popcorn with NO extra butter..ugh. (Can you tell I'm speaking from experience? HA!) If, however, you have never been on a diet...DON'T TELL ME!!! Anyway, if you've ever attempted any form of a diet whether it was a full on weight watcher's style diet complete with daily workouts and a strict schedule or whether it was simply to give up soda and late night snacking, then you know how hard it is to change your lifestyle. Dieting goes against everything our body "wants" to do! A sunday school teacher of mine put it best when he said that "our stomachs are spoiled brats!" He is SO right! When our stomach wants to eat, it wants what it wants and it wants it NOW! It takes alot of self control and careful planning in order to successfully stay on a diet. Another horrible emotion that comes along with dieting is guilt. When you have so perfectly planned out your meals for the entire week not even going over your assigned callorie count by so much as a tootsie roll and then Saturday night comes and Grandma calls offering to babysit so you can go out to dinner and all you can think is "we only get to go out once every few months...I am SO getting the steak and loaded baked potato and as many rolls as I can stuff into my mouth!" During the meal you feel awesome! You are alone with your husband, or maybe girlfriends, and the entire evening is perfect! Afterward, however, the "food guilt" sets in. You feel stuffed, tired, miserable and just want to lay down...only to say to yourself as you go to sleep "tomorrow I will REALLY start this diet."

Lesson Learned? Besides obviously learning the great life lesson that dieting is hard hard work, I have also learned that my dieting life can so be paralleled to my life in Christ. We approach Christ with the attitude that day in and day out we are going to do this "christian" thing perfectly! We are going to read our Bible for one hour a day and pray whenever we have a free moment. We are going to not only attend church whenever they have a service but we are also going to sign up for, volunteer for and attend every single event offered by our home church! We set the bar HIGH! We have such great expectatioins for ourselves only to be racked with guilg the first time we miss a church service or go one day without reading our Bible. Just as in dieting we make living a life for Chrsit WAY too hard. When you start a diet there's no way you can tell yourself "I'm never going to eat pizza or ice cream EVER again!" When you do this you are only setting yourself up for failure. And if you don't fail you will simply be miserable! (On the diet I mean...!!) Just as in our daily relationship with Christ we far too often form God into our minds as a strong armed tyrant who squashes us into nothingness the moment we read only one chapter in our Bible instead of three or four or five! God is not like this! And besides that, and an even more important factor in life is, WE ARE NOT PERFECT! The same sunday school teacher I mentioned earlier also once said "give yourself a break!" and I think that's really good advice. Just as in our dieting journey there will be ups and downs in our walk with the Lord. Some days we will stick to our devotion routine and witness to everyone we come in contact with and other days we will wake up late, barely get the kids to school on time and then have to order pizza for dinner because the day was so overwhelming! (Oh great! Now you've not had a devotional and ruined that so called diet by ordering take out...grrrr!) Life is a journey, dieting is a journey and our walk with Christ is a journey...none of these are destinations. Take your walk with God day by day. Love him as much as you can everyday. Make the decision to do your best everyday. Some days that "best" will be better then others but don't beat yourself up when your best is praying in the shower and not giving a dirtly look to the person who cut you off in traffic! Now, don't get me wrong here and misquote me. This is not a liscense to live wild and make wrong choices. Just as in dieting, if we all just gave up, never made healthy choices and never turned down dessert we would be HUGE! We would just continue to gain weight and gain weight and gain weight until we had to stay in bed all the time and be completely immobile. The same is true in our christian life. If we simply give up and do whatever "feels right" then we will just fall deeper and deeper away from Christ until we are unusable and not in tune with the voice of God. Neither are healthy. The lesson simply is to have a plan. Practice self control as best you can each and everyday. Do your best each and everyday but expect to fall and sometimes even fail. Expect setbacks. Expect that some days will feel like one step forward and two steps back. Does that mean you lay down and die? Does that mean you give up? No way! When you've had "one of those days" just lay your head down on your pillow at night and say to yourself "tomorrow I'll..."