weight

Finding God Is Easy! It’s Just Like Finding Our Abs!

/ Lori Lawe / Leave a comment
woman in gray top
Photo by Tachina Lee on Unsplash

I choked on my coffee and almost fell over when I overheard my daughter’s online science class this morning. Here’s what was said, verbatim, because this is from the online recording.* (I’m not even exaggerating this time!)

Student: “They were so old they should have been hospitalized!” (Lori’s comment: I didn’t know there was an “age” at which hospitalization occurs!)

Teacher: “About how old?”

Student: “I dunno- Maybe 40 or 50 years old!”

My reaction reflected the fact that I personally MIGHT be INCHING toward (or way past) one of those ages this youth deemed as “should be hospitalized.”

That discussion inspired the post today – I know that none of us like to say this out loud or admit that this is a reality, but one day, I started growing older!

At around the same time, I noticed I had lost my abs.

I had always had abs as a youth. I even tree-planted (which means I’m tough), and that’s how I got some of those muscles.

man standing in front of LED bulbs
Photo by Xenia Bogarova on Unsplash

But somehow, one morning, when I woke up, my abs weren’t there anymore! I looked around, trying to find them. Then I learned that when you’re older, a higher percentage of your body turns into fat.

For example, here’s a chart of ideal body fat percentages aligned to age.

“Dang!” I thought that morning. “My abs turned into fat!”

“Oh well,” was my next thought. I had already dejectedly accepted my fate. A took another sip of my coffee and stared at the morning news.

I already said this in another post, but you weren’t listening, so I will repeat it.

(I mean, who has time to listen anymore? Especially when we all have so much to say! We only have 2 hours and 24 minutes to vent our passionate, frustrating irks on social media daily! And no, I’m not talking about me listening to you. I’m talking about you listening to me! Why don’t YOU listen to ME?)

So, I wanted to say I lost weight.

When that happened, I realized that my abs hadn’t turned to fat. They were covered in fat! And when the extra stuff was gone, there they were!

My abs came out from hiding.

Some of you are wondering where God is, as well. Maybe you knew Him for a while or had an experience of Him, just like I had abs when I was younger, but now where is He? Well, here’s the good news:

He’s right there, under your fat!

Under your spiritual fat, that is. He’s been with you this whole time! All you need to do is get rid of some of the junk.

It means we’d better get on with it. Strip down, start running—and never quit! No extra spiritual fat, no parasitic sins. 

The Message

As the song below plays, ask God, “What garbage do you want me to bring to the curb? And what one next step do I need to take to stretch out my hand to receive the beautiful gift of Your love that You long to pour out on me affectionately?” (I pray you make the exchange, friend.)

And may you find your abs, too! I mean God.

Footnotes

*Yes! They record classes online now! Those poor teachers! Do YOU want your every frustration toward insolent youth recorded? Thank God they haven’t yet figured out how to record every word we homeschooling parents utter! If you find yourself accidentally emitting a mischievous word, here’s a tip to cover up the incident.

You’re welcome!

Good luck!

Thanks for reading Restoring Life! Subscribe for free to receive new posts, support my work and so my ego feels important!

The One Valuable Ingredient To Find God And Lose Weight

/ Lori Lawe / Leave a comment

I was shocked when the notification blared its announcement.

I was in the top 3% of users of a new nutrition app I was using.

The TOP 3%.

Everyone else (or 97% of people – whatever! – stay with me!) had already given up.

Now, I have to back up a bit to explain.

As you know, and have been forever changed by, I wrote a riveting blog post series last fall on weight loss. (To my editor: Why DIDN’T anyone read those posts, anyway?)

I have been (more or less) within the healthy weight range (basically – okay!) for my entire life, which has been no small feat.

However, when following my advice failed me, I decided to switch it up and buy a nutrition app. Truthfully, I am constantly trying new approaches and programs and learning a bit more about implementing healthy habits, which is the point of this post. But I’m not talking about that right now.

I’m talking about the notification that startled me.

I thought I was the ultimate failure in using this nutrition app. Check this out. The photo below is an actual graph of my progress over two months, showing NO improvement in achieving my ideal weight.

None.

There are normal fluctuations, but the graph of this line is flat.

Same, same, samers.

I immediately unsubscribed to the “encouragement” texts accompanying this app because so many people complained in a way I could not comprehend.

“I only lost 5 pounds this month!” they would complain.

Huh?

I hadn’t lost anything, so I could not relate.

But I kept going with the program.

And the results EVENTUALLY paid off. EVENTUALLY. I lost 10 pounds recently and feel a lot better.

And I believe the results would have also paid off for many, many other app users.

If only they kept trying.

And now, we’ll switch gears to talk about God, but it’s not changing gears, because the concept is the same.

MOST PEOPLE GIVE UP TOO SOON IN THEIR SEARCH FOR GOD

Is it annoying people that keep you away from your search for God? Get over them! (Get over yourself too, but that’s for when you are MUCH more spiritually sanctified and you realize that you are a loser too!)

Is God distant, just out of reach? You’re on the right path. God hides Himself as a critical component of his character.

God delights in concealing things

The Message

Why, you ask?

He is not a dictator, shouting orders and wanting us to go off somewhere and obey every minute detail of his complicated directives. He longs to walk WITH us on this journey we call life. He wants us to WANT to want Him.

And so, right now, He is bending down low but right next to you. Will you reach out, tag his back, and say, “Gotcha!”

Will you seek Him?

If we don’t give up, even though most people do, and keep walking forward, following where we last saw his footsteps and carving out time in our busy day to sit with Him, unhurried, if we read his word, and ask others what it means even when we don’t understand it, then we will find God.

He’s waiting for you right now, holding out His hand to you.

And so, what is the one valuable ingredient to lose weight and find God?

Perseverance.

There’s more to come . . . keeping us alert for whatever God will do next.

The Message

Keep walking, friend.

Hunger for Jesus attracts the manifest (felt) presence of His Spirit. Does your hunger for God outweigh your discouragement? He’ll help you up, point you in a new direction, lighten the weight on your feet, help you soar.

Don’t give up just before your breakthrough, friend.

Anyone Else Want To Dance In February Instead Of Sit In Despair?

/ Lori Lawe / Leave a comment

As mentioned last time, my head was in my hands, a cloud of despair surrounding me, weighing me down.

Regardless of how I was feeling, I had to make a choice. Do I take another fun pill, declare another ski day, to distract from this swirling pit beneath me, my life, that threatened to consume me?

Or did I put on my work pants, and get busy constructing a new life for myself and for my homeschooling family, one that we would have the strength to complete all the way from September to June?

And you? Is anyone else feeling the February pull into that familiar black hole of despair?

How do we dance in joy through the dark month of winter?

1. We lift our despair, scoop as much as we can in our hands, and we lift this offering to God.

2. We listen. We reattach our ears. We practice the habits that are the glue helping our ears to stay stuck.

3. We tell others in our trusted community what we think the spirit of God is whispering. The sounds are muffled and garbled, and the sound waves pass through our hearts mixed with wrong motives, so we have trouble understanding.

4. We look for our dancing shoes. Where are they again? Where are those dreams? Where did we last leave them? Who did God say I am, again?

5. We gingerly take His hand and step onto the dance floor of our lives. He is in the lead, not us. Will we humbly let him lead our lives? Will we give up our right to drive our own car and our accompanying future car wrecks to learn how to dance?

The choice is yours. The choice is mine.

Come on, friend! The adventure of a lifetime awaits us! Get up off that couch!

God, all of us long for a good father who holds out a hand to help us up when we fall. The one who has everything we need to open the right door of opportunity for our future lives.

You are that Father.

Open our eyes to see this.

May we trust You more deeply. Help us get off the couch to escape from the lies we believe about ourselves and our lives.

You alone offer us genuine hope for our futures.

May we have the courage to step onto the dance floor with You.

Teach us to dance.

As you meditate on the words below and listen to the song below, take deep breaths and practice quieting your heart before God.

You did it: you changed wild lament
into whirling dance;
You ripped off my black mourning band
and decked me with wildflowers.
I’m about to burst with song;
I can’t keep quiet about you.
God, my God,
I can’t thank you enough.

The Message

Cry out to Him. What gift do you imagine He is giving you?

Quiet your heart again, and then ask God how He sees you. What do you feel? What does your mind imagine?

Is it time to look for some dancing shoes?

To Lose Weight, DON’T Focus On Food – Focus On Identity (Healthy Habits Post 10)

/ Lori Lawe / Leave a comment

I threw away the diet books in a fit of frustration.

I failed.

Again.

HOW is it possible that EVERY time I start to diet, I GAIN weight?

True story.

I don’t even lose weight for a while and THEN gain weight.

My body pushes the pedal to the floor, green light ahead, and helps me put on the pounds without meandering through the territory of “thinner me” first.

“Thanks a lot”, I thought. My body is too smart for me. I had to find another angle.

HOW can I win this battle of the bulge with a body that bulges whenever I FOCUS on my food, I wondered?

I was focusing on the wrong thing.

That’s when I learned about “identity.”

“Identity” and related terms were some of the most frequently Googled words in 2023. Yet I think it’s safe to say that few of us clearly understand what EXACTLY identity IS or HOW it applies to ME.

IDENTITY was the smoking gun that allowed me to keep wrestling (granted, I am still in the ring) with the battle of the bulge in my own life.

Here’s the secret. Lean in close.

Is no one looking? Ok . . . (shh… what will it take for us to BELIEVE ourselves that we are the KIND OF PERSON WHO IS FIT?).

Then we do that – end of discussion.

I’ll explain to you the FORM of what exactly this looks like in my own life. Then, if you’re still interested, I can explain WHY this works.

I will first discuss a CAR (the FORM) and then an ENGINE (the WHY) to convert the above paragraph to an analogy.

The CAR I drive is reliable and gets me where I need to go. These are the actions I take to stay fit. The ENGINE of the car, the fire and the pistons that make the wheels go around are found in digging into beliefs about identity.

In the analogy above, I drive a 20-year-old Toyota. In real life, this is the car my Grandpa gave me when he could no longer drive. He scratched and bashed this car from headlights to tail lights from failing vision and judgment, but it was a VERY reliable car because he didn’t have far to go each day.

This Toyota is kind of like me. I care that I can get from here to there and reliably do my errands. My goal, as much as I can control, is to be fit enough to have a reliable body that gets me where I need to go.

Being a healthy weight is not about image but about avoiding pain associated with obesity, if possible, in other words.

So how do we do that?

I focus on what I must do to TRICK MYSELF INTO BELIEVING I AM A FIT PERSON.

Sometimes I do a Triathlon. Sometimes, I complete P90X, and related challenging workout programs. Once, I bought equipment and lessons to learn to skate ski.

I did THE KIND OF THINGS THAT FIT PEOPLE do.

I pretended to be someone else, in other words.

And then I thought, “Fit people eat green smoothies in the morning, so BECAUSE I AM A FIT PERSON, I will do that too.”

And so now we’re talking about the engine of the car.

I naturally ate MORE OFTEN like a fit person because I BELIEVED that I was a fit person.

It was all about identity.

Something else about identity?

Jesus cared a lot about identity.

We have a record of six times that Jesus asked something along the lines of, “Who do (the people/ the crowds/ you) say I am?“

Identity is the A-Z of what drives your car in life.

What we believe about the identity of Jesus is the steering wheel in the car He is riding.

What we believe about His identity determines whether the car of God is coming toward us, bearing the overwhelming love of the Spirit and all of the inheritance that adoption by a King offers. Or whether we are hitchhiking and miss the car of God again.

‘May it be the real I who speaks. May it be the real Thou that I speak to.’

C. S. Lewis – Letters to Malcolm

God, help us to see ourselves using the glasses You use to look at us. And may we, by Your Spirit, grow into Your best vision for us and for our lives, we pray.

I Lied Again But Here Are 3 TRUE Tricks To Curb Sugar (Healthy Habits Post 9)

/ Lori Lawe / Leave a comment

Yeah, OK. I lied again.

I said I FORGOT to finish the blog post series I started on Healthy Habits. That is only PARTIALLY true. I am more organized than you think!

The TRUTH is that I didn’t think we would want to discuss fasting the week before Christmas when we are constantly stuffing our faces with stuffing and turkey and homemade treats and eggnog.

But now that we are on the couch, stomachs in pain and feeling like losers (Losers in a good way, if you haven’t read that post), let me help you get off the couch and let’s punish our bodies again by doing things we don’t like: eating less food, exercising etc.

Or let’s trick ourselves into believing we like doing the stuff we may not always feel like doing.

Whatever.

So January is here!

I would recommend starting off the year by re-reading my blogpost series about Healthy Habits.

Time to get fit!

This post in the Healthy Habits series is a recommendation to try to (more or less) eat dessert on Sundays only.

But that is impossible, right?

Yeah, I know, but we have to try to wean ourselves off the hourly Christmas treats, eventually.

Here’s how:

1. Trick yourself into thinking you are eating dessert when you are not.

Like a cocaine addict (are they the ones that use needles, again?) seeking a fix, I MUST HAVE a snack like this one every day. This is the FIRST item I make when I run out. I’ll skip cooking supper to have a week of these on hand.

Why? Because they FEEL like dessert, even though they are not! Fat and sugar and chocolate and yum all rolled up into a ball! But it’s healthy fat (nuts) and healthy sugar (dates) and chocolate (of course). I eat these at 3:00 pm when I’m craving my fix, and there is just enough heroin (substitute) to help me last another few hours till supper and my nightly camomile tea fix.

2. Downscale your addictive personality.

Our church has been reaching out to our city’s homeless population, and it is AMAZING how much sugar these people who have kicked their drug addictions mainline (Can you mainline sugar?) Whatever.

But let’s face it, mainlining sugar is a LOT healthier than mainlining crystal meth!

Since the reality is that we, too, are just nicely dressed balls of addiction, chasing the wrong desires, let’s learn from them!

Let’s downscale our addictions!

For example, I met a lady last week who stopped smoking and then gained 30 pounds. But stuffing our faces with food is better than stuffing our faces with cancer sticks!

In my case, I am more addicted to sugar than I am to processed chips. So I TRY to eat chips instead of sugar. Once I’m addicted to chips, it’s easier to wean myself off of that addiction. I’ve been downscaled!

It’s easier to eat less chips than it is to mainline crystal meth!

Get the pattern?

While we’re at it, downscaling our addictions, let’s upscale our Levels of Happiness!

3. Let’s look forward to making massive pigs of ourselves.

As per the theme of point two above, we don’t start out at the finish line, having already won the race.

Meaning let’s cut ourselves some slack! We are all basically crack-addicted homeless people, seeking happiness in all the wrong places, so let’s cut ourselves some slack!

Let’s LOOK FORWARD to making a COMPLETE PIG of ourselves on Sundays! A COMPLETE cheesecake with Oreos and highly processed foods on Sunday, anyone?

Start where we’re at!

We’ll eat ONE piece of cake with good manners and a napkin sometime on the future Sunday. Even if our progress is WAY OUT in the future, we celebrate successes! You’re awesome!

Good luck!

You’re welcome!

We’re Overweight Because We Lack Organization Not Self-Control (Healthy Habits Post 8)

/ Lori Lawe / Leave a comment

Hopefully, I’m organized enough to remember that I was writing a series of posts on a particular topic and then if I get distracted, come back at a later date and finish the series.

It happens more than I’d like to admit that I write a post, announce something I’ll talk about later and then completely forget that I ever wrote that.

In the last few posts, I took a break from my blogpost series about healthy habits. But today I remembered to . . . I mean . . . I AM writing about healthy habits.

It’s not that I didn’t WANT to finish the series of posts I am writing about healthy habits.

It’s just that I’m highly distractible.

What was I saying?

Anyway, this post is about how to be more organized and focused, so let’s get started!

I proved definitely in previous posts that we ACTUALLY:

  1. LOVE practicing annoying healthy habits
  2. LOVE drinking nothing but water
  3. LOVE becoming exhausted exercising
  4. LOVE eating green food
  5. LOVE starving ourselves
  6. LOVE to avoid dessert (future blog post, if I remember)

So by now, we have finally figured out (or tricked ourselves into believing) that these healthy habits are awesome.

How we DO these habits, the hard work of rolling up our sleeves and getting them done is the next part.

But that’s not as hard now, because if we WANT to do something, then getting up enough willpower to prep and do the work so we can DO these habits is the easy part. 

Being successful in life is kind of like being successful in homeschooling our kids, I think.

The main goal of a homeschooling parent is to structure school in such a way that the kid enjoys learning as much as possible. If a kid WANTS to do something we can stand back, and yeah, maybe even drink a martini by the pool for once, for real. (For about an hour, tops, but this time I’m telling the truth about martinis).

And it’s the same with motivating us. When we WANT to do something we can make it happen.

Sometimes we beat ourselves up for all the wrong reasons. We are annoyed at ourselves for having an unhealthy lunch, and we assume it must have something to do with self-control.

Organization is the real culprit.

Try spending two hours on the weekend preparing healthy food to make these healthy habits easier during the week.

Here is an example to get you started. Her methods have been transformational for me.

I’ve learned that if we put in that extra bit of effort to buy proper running shoes, it’s a lot easier to run the race. Similarly, if we put that little bit of effort into preparing healthy foods then success is inevitable.

We won’t go from couch potatoes to famous triathletes in one week, of course, but we will make progress, and progress is enough.

Jesus told them a story showing that it was necessary for them to pray consistently and never quit.

The Message

We can find a way, and we’re proud of ourselves, and we can give ourselves a little sticker on the wall or whatever it is that motivates us, particularly.

Yes! I do have a LOT of stickers! Why do you ask?

And whatever it takes, right?

You Love Eating Only Air Instead of Feasting On Turkey – Admit it! (Healthy Habits Post 8)

/ Lori Lawe / Leave a comment

One of these days I’m going to write a book about how to have copious financial resources. The key premise:

To accumulate more money, simply buy less stuff!

Lori Lawe, TM*

I’m writing this blog post series about healthy weight, however, but a similar key premise applies:

If we want to stop carrying around all that extra jiggly stuff in the middle, at some point, we may have to talk about eating a bit less food.

Lori Lawe, TM*

Today’s blog post is about ENJOYING eating less.

I’m the kind of person that likes to have fun. So if we have to do something that’s not fun, let’s trick ourselves into thinking that we are having fun! So, as you are learning these helpful tips and habits, try to keep in the back of your mind the key lesson which is: Eating air is way more fun than eating tempting and delicious food!

Today we will learn to trick ourselves that we:

1. Are eating dessert when we are not,
2. Love God more than we love padding our belly fat, and
3. Are stuffing ourselves when we’re not eating anything at all.

  1. No dessert anyone? Back when I remembered I was writing a series of posts about healthy habits, I wrote that one of the habits was to have camomile tea just before bed. This is a great tip I picked up on the internet that actually helped me! I guess there IS useful information out there somewhere! You put quite a bit of extra honey in your camomile tea after supper. Then you tell yourself “This is dessert!” You’re having extra honey so it is a bit of a treat. Then you drink your tea with the relish of eating an entire cheesecake, and wait until Sunday for real dessert. You can do it!
  2. God or more belly fat? The next habit is kind of cool and it’s a way to develop the habit of fasting and seeking God, without having to do any work (Oh wait, did I say that out loud?) As you know, and I’ve discussed here, I found fasting for spiritual purposes, for even more than – oh – 10 minutes, to be a little challenging. So this is a compromise. I just try to delay my breakfast. We all have to start somewhere! Use that time of being a bit hungry to push yourself into God, to ask Him why you’re such a spaz most of the time, to pour out your heart, and you’ll realize that breakfast kind of loses its allure. Your deeper needs are emerging. And so, this habit has become one of my favorite habits, if I’m honest. Plus your body thanks you. There’s a lot of good research about intermittent fasting. And the way I’ve structured these habits, where you kind of trick yourself into thinking you’re eating dessert when you’re not after supper (so you’re not eating), and you just delay your breakfast for a bit turns into a temporary fast. But don’t tell your body that because your mind might not like it, and it’s all about keeping your mind happy, right? Even if you are deceiving your mind a bit. Who’s counting?
  3. Top secret tip for tricking yourself into thinking you are eating copious amounts of food when you’re not eating anything at all. Don’t tell anyone I said this, or at least don’t link back to this site if you do. (I won’t admit I ever said this), but here’s an AMAZING tip. Shh…. Top secret. . . Lean your head over the food dish of choice, when no one is looking, of course. Close your eyes, inhale, enjoy the smells, and pretend you’re chewing. Say, “Yum!” A second plate without any calories, anyone? (Was anyone looking when I said that? Whew! No one heard!) Remember you didn’t hear it from me! Enjoy!

Whoever can figure out how to market the promise: How to enjoy whatever foods you want, whenever you want them, and not gain any weight, and then link to Point 3 above will be a millionaire! Cut me 10% of your profits, please! (I still won’t admit I had anything to do with you, however.)

Hey maybe you want to ghostwrite my financial book discussed in the first paragraph, come to think of it!

We could call it, “How to ENJOY Getting Rich And Thin!”

You’re welcome!

Good luck!

Blogpost Footnotes

*Trademarked

(My conscience finds it ironic, for some reason, that I’m eating a 482g bag of “snacking chocolate” as I write this. Don’t forget to eat lots of chocolate when people are looking to confuse them! Because confusing people is fun.)

You LOVE Eating Green Food, Remember? (Healthy Habits Post 5)

/ Lori Lawe / Leave a comment

The point of today’s blog post is to remind you that you ACTUALLY LOVE eating green food!

Three examples to prove this to you:

1. Green smoothies for breakfast. Have you ever had a green smoothie at Jugo Juice or a local smoothie shop and you think – “Wow! I should make that!”

But then you get home, and the cat is on your lap, and another episode of Downton Abby auto started, and you can’t easily get up, and then it’s the next morning, and you’ve forgotten all about the fact that you ever had a green smoothie?

(I know who hasn’t, right?)

Well, the thing is:

You actually enjoyed drinking the green smoothie, and it was good for you.

So just make one, OK?

You actually WANT to drink green smoothies, if you get the right green smoothie, and if someone (Your mother?) puts it in front of you in the morning.

I make green smoothies that people who don’t even like green smoothies say taste good. Or check out this website for delicious green smoothie ideas on steroids.

But don’t whine about the fact that drinking a green smoothie is one of your habits. You LIKE drinking green smoothies, remember?

2. Another habit is having salads for lunch.

When I was a “working” person (I guess therefore I haven’t “worked” in decades! Ha! Hilarious!) and had extra dollars to spare, I would buy my lunch every day (What was I thinking? Did I not think I’d ever have kids?).

And I actually CHOSE a salad.

It was an amazing salad a bit like these ones. It had protein and tons of lettuce.

It actually filled me up. And it tasted good.

The thing is, now that I’m homeschooling my kids, I look in the fridge and (even though yes, I do organize the cooking in our family) nobody cooked the chicken breast again. It’s lunchtime and I’m hungry! I guess I’ll just have some tortilla chips and chocolate.

But here’s the thing – if someone (Your mom? Your homeschooled teen) put this delicious salad in front of you at lunch with homemade dressing, you will love it! You’re just not organized enough to figure out how to get all the parts moving in one place.

The HOW of making a green salad will be discussed another time, but for now, open up your eyes and realize – eating green salads for lunch is – BLEEP! – (You don’t swear remember?)* awesome!

3. Veggies and dip for snacks. OK, this is the thing about cut-up veggies and dip. If you have a delicious, appetizing dip, and the veggies are right there, it’s amazing how many vegetables our kids will eat! Try it!

Oh – One important caveat –they’ll eat it all day long IF we hide the chips and candy, that is. The trick is, basically if they’re starving and you don’t offer them any other food, they’ll eat their veggies! It’s like magic!

And just like my dog LOVES to cuddle, your kids will LOVE eating vegetables too!

Why do you spend your money on junk food, your hard-earned cash on cotton candy?

THE MESSAGE

The point is that what you WANT is green stuff.

It’s not your desires that are off.

It’s just that your organization sucks.

Making green smoothies, having everything ready for a delicious salad at lunch, and seeing a veggie tray with delicious dip waiting to greet you each morning is not as easy as it seems.

Now that you’ve realized what you like to eat (and if you still don’t LONG for green food, read this), we’ll talk about HOW to have green food ready to bite into with thankful and glorious abandon in a future blog post.

Proof you LOVE feasting on green spiritual food (as well as green physical food) will be discussed in a future post.

Blogpost Footnotes

* Do you want a cupcake?

Hey! Let’s Stop Choosing Nutritional Death And Spiritual Death! (Healthy Habits Post 4)

/ Lori Lawe / Leave a comment

Why do you spend your money on junk food,
your hard-earned cash on cotton candy?
Listen to me, listen well: Eat only the best,
fill yourself with only the finest.
Pay attention, come close now,
listen carefully to my life-giving, life-nourishing words.

The Message

Just because we make stupid choices sometimes doesn’t mean we have to stay stupid.

In order for us to soar into the purposes and plans God has for us, we have to DESIRE the right things.

Why does the cocaine addict again choose to pick up and use the half-full needle he just found? (Do you use needles for cocaine? Dang! My inner Ned Flanders just can’t be suppressed! At least I didn’t say “Don’t drink drugs” like one of my kids does!)

Why do we, the societally privileged people that we are, look down on the cocaine addict mentioned above, and then again and again, we choose slow death over a victorious, energetic life?

Clearly stated: Why do we CHOOSE junk food?

Exactly like the cocaine addict mentioned above, we DESIRE the wrong things.

Truly soaring can only happen when we DESIRE the right things.

When DESIRE outside of God’s BEST plan for our lives defines us, and we follow the fulfilment of this desire, we are zombies following death wherever it leads.

So WAKE UP!

And eat your vegetables.

And just as we desire the wrongful foods that don’t let us soar, we desire placebos over spiritual fulfillment as well.

So what is the solution to not desiring nutritional health or spiritual health?

God help me to desire the best kind of physical food that will help me to soar in life.

And this prayer:

God help me to desire the best kind of spiritual food that will help me to soar in life.

So let’s ask God to help us DESIRE healthier food more often. For example, we’ll talk about how to ENJOYING eating our vegetables next time.

And let’s listen to uplifting music instead of listening to that gross crap that gets pumped into our ears in every department store we visit.

As we listen to something like this:

Let’s ask God questions like these:

Jesus, how am I chasing my deadly DESIRE when I should be chasing You? How am I blind, like the cocaine addict mentioned above, and think I know what is best for me, by following my desires, when really, I need You to help me completely change my desires?

Can you help me WANT to desire the right things?

There are many, many stories of people who experience a taste of God and then never touch their addictive substance of choice again. That’s cool too.

So let’s keep making time for Jesus by reading God’s word and listening to Holy Spirit in our times of prayer, and by connecting with God-seeking community.

Freedom from desire that leads to death and that masks our desperate need for God is on its way, if we will but stretch out our hands and receive.

How To LOVE Exhausting Yourself Exercising! (Healthy Habits Part 3)

/ Lori Lawe / Leave a comment

Not long ago, I wrote a post outlining Ten Keystone Habits that allowed me to stay within my recommended weight range my entire life. The first keystone habit is to LOVE drinking nothing but water.

The second keystone habit is exercise. Ha! Spellcheck changed EXERcise to EXORcise. Exorcism is a good habit too, but today we’re talking about exercise. The two go hand-in-hand actually. You want to get rid of any negative influences in your life (exorcise) so you can have the energy to do what God is calling you to do.

Tip 1: You want to remember how you feel AFTER you do exercise. Not before. Not during. 

You are going to feel amazing.

In fact, your new identity as a “person who is getting fit” and how you therefore feel is going to fuel this whole thing – all the healthy habits – on losing weight.

So this habit is not to be skipped.

For now, let’s start where we’re at. If all we can do is walk, let’s go for a walk, bring our dog and our friend, get an ice cream after if it’s Sunday – who cares? We did it! Let’s give ourselves a pat on the back.

The passive-aggressive, intense ones among us do better with some challenge to our exercise routines to keep boredom away.

Two examples of exercise challenges from my life:

– I felt God calling me to learn a new sport, squash, in middle age. How is God calling us into a new thing in this next season? Could this be as mundane as exercise, or do we assume God is only interested in more “spiritual” endeavours? (Answer: Nope, He’s interested in guiding us always).

– Dreaming about sports that are sometimes just out of reach due to intermittent back problems keeps me motivated to get stronger: mountain biking, downhill skiing, triathlons, CrossFit, climbing.

Did my 20-year-old climbing gear stored in the basement disintegrate from neglect yet? Dreaming about opening the box again ignites a future challenge that motivates me to do my granny exercises again today.

(Our motivation doesn’t have to necessarily be encumbered by reality).

Tip 2: Have your exercise clothes ready in the bathroom so that as soon as you get up, without thinking, the first thing you do is put them on. Your challenge is to wear exercise clothes all day until you’ve done some exercise. Even if it’s exercising for a few minutes here and there.

Tip 3: Ideally, let’s get out in the morning! This stimulates earlier melatonin release helping us sleep better at night, too.

All in all, we’ve just gotta do it.

So right now, I’m your mother and just do it. The world needs you and your gifts. How are you going to have enough energy to do all the things God is calling you to do if you’re not going to rev your energy levels up by getting some exercise?

This is non-negotiable. 

I feel strongly. You have to listen to me. 

That’s all I have to say for now. Do it or else! 

Goodbye!