Wait...Loss is hard.

I don't exactly know where to start. All I know is that I have to say this because it has been burning inside me for some time now.

For context, I am morbidly obese. It certainly isn't something I am proud of and, up until recently, I had quietly withdrawn from the world into the comfort of my home in the Hills. Everything is familiar here. There is a sense of ease that comes from knowing the streets, the shops and the people around me. I don't feel watched here. I don't feel judged. Home became my safe place and, looking back now, I think it became something else as well. It became somewhere I could quietly disappear.

But life has a funny way of disrupting the stories we tell ourselves.

A few months ago I started a new job. Suddenly I found myself catching public transport every day, surrounded by unfamiliar people in unfamiliar places. I had been gently, almost without realising it, living a smaller and smaller life. Now my circumstances were pushing me back into the world whether I was ready or not.

Every morning I squeeze into the Metro with hundreds of other commuters. Like everyone else, I look for an empty seat. The seats are incredibly narrow, even by skinny people standards. Every day I notice the little things. The sigh. Someone shifting slightly away. The sideways glance that tells me they're calculating how much room I take up. I've become accustomed to those moments.

But this afternoon I got more than a sigh.

As I went to sit in the only available seat between two passengers, the young woman beside it looked at me and said, "You're not seriously going to try to squeeze in here?"

I nodded.

She huffed before adding, loudly enough for everyone nearby to hear, "You know, you could try losing some weight. Ugh."

Oddly enough, I wasn't offended.

What could I do? Argue? Explain the last twenty years of my life in a thirty-second train ride? So I sat down.

The irony is that only moments earlier I had been quietly congratulating myself. When I first started this new job, the commute almost broke me. I could barely walk from the station. My legs hurt, my ankles swelled and everything ached. But over the past few weeks something had changed. I realised I had a stride again. I was walking further, walking faster and feeling stronger.  Not so fast, Amy!

The woman on the train couldn't possibly have known any of that. She only saw my body. She didn't see the progress. She didn't see the effort. She didn't see me.

When she got off the train, the passenger on my other side quietly turned to me and said, "I'm so sorry you had to go through that."

And that's when I cried.  Not while I was being humiliated.  Afterwards.  I think I cried because, in that moment, someone acknowledged that what had happened wasn't okay. For a brief second I wasn't just an inconvenience taking up too much room. I was a human being who had been hurt.

The incident happened less than two hours ago and I'm still crying as I write this.

I don't think I'm crying because of what happened on the train.

I think I'm crying because, for the first time, I'm beginning to understand why I built the armour in the first place.

Dear people who have never lived in a body like mine,

I'm not writing this because I expect strangers on trains to suddenly become kinder, although I wish they would. I'm writing it because today forced me to confront something I think I've been misunderstanding about myself for years. And if I'm only just beginning to understand it at 47 years old, perhaps there are other people carrying armour they don't yet recognise either. 

I didn't get here overnight.  This wasn't a matter of waking up one morning and discovering I'd put on three kilos and better cut back on ice-cream.  As I look back over my life, I can trace a path. Not one I consciously chose, but one that quietly unfolded over decades.

As a child I was constantly told how beautiful I was. That might sound like a lovely thing to hear, but my childhood wasn't safe. Then, as a young teenager, I experienced a further incident. Looking back now, I wonder whether somewhere inside me I quietly concluded that beauty wasn't safe. Being noticed wasn't safe. Attracting attention wasn't safe.

I don't remember consciously deciding that I wanted to disappear.  I don't think anyone does.  But I do think that, over time, I built armour.  If I wasn't attractive, perhaps I wouldn't attract predators.  It sounds irrational when I write it down. But frightened children rarely make rational decisions. They make decisions that help them survive.

If I stayed home, perhaps I couldn't be hurt.  If I made my world smaller, perhaps it would become safer.  Looking back, I think hibernation became part of the armour too. Home wasn't just comfortable. It was predictable. Safe. Nothing unexpected happened there. No strangers. No crowded trains. No one looking at me.

The armour didn't just change my body. It quietly changed the way I lived. Once hiding became safer than living, everything else seemed to follow.

The more I hid, the less I moved. The less I moved, the more weight I gained. The more discouraged I became, the more I withdrew. Depression fed the hiding. The hiding fed the weight. The weight reinforced the armour. Before I knew it, years had passed.

The tragedy is that the very armour that once protected me slowly became the thing that imprisoned me.

Please don't misunderstand me.

I don't like being this big. I haven't for a very long time. I miss moving freely. I miss feeling healthy. I miss walking into a room without wondering whether people are looking at me. I miss fitting comfortably into chairs, train seats and aeroplane seats. I miss participating in life without my size being the first thing I think about.

For years I thought the answer was simply to lose weight. I've dieted. I've lost weight. I've put it back on again. Every single time I blamed myself. I thought I lacked discipline. I thought I simply didn't want it enough.

But there is something I've never admitted out loud because, quite honestly, it frightens me.
The last time I lost a significant amount of weight, putting it back on almost felt... purposeful.  Even writing those words makes me uncomfortable.  Why would anyone work so hard to lose weight only to regain it?  I don't think I understood it then.  I'm not even sure I fully understand it now.  But I wonder whether I wasn't putting the weight back on.  I wonder whether I was putting the armour back on.

That thought has changed everything for me.  Because if my weight became my armour, then asking myself to simply lose it is like asking a soldier to walk into battle without protection.

No wonder I've struggled.  I wasn't trying to lose weight.  I was trying to let go of the very thing that had convinced me I was safe.  For years I've been asking myself the wrong question.  I've been asking, "How do I lose the armour?"  Now I think the real question is, "How do I become the sort of person who no longer needs it?"  Those are two very different journeys.

I don't want to spend the rest of my life fighting the armour. I think it served a purpose. I think a frightened little girl built it because she genuinely believed it would keep us safe.  And perhaps it did, for a while.

But I'm not that little girl anymore.  I'm a grown woman now, and I don't want to live the rest of my life in survival mode.  I want to learn how to lay the armour down.

Not because someone tells me I should.

Not because society expects me to.

But because I want to know what it feels like to live in a world where I no longer need it.

Sincerely,

Amy xo

On Hagar...& the God who sees me

 

The Wilderness of Shur is a significant geographical and historical location mentioned in the Bible, primarily in the context of the Israelites' exodus from Egypt. It is a desert region situated to the northeast of Egypt, forming part of the larger wilderness area that the Israelites traversed during their journey to the Promised Land.
(source)

I am drawn to strong women throughout history. There is something deeply compelling about those labelled “the weaker sex” who rise above station, status, class, whatever the constraint, and take up the hard work, the strong position, and weather it all, often with very little support. When we look at these women, I often wonder: who is recorded as standing beside them? Who were their allies?

Lately, circumstance has had me thinking about Hagar. Let me say upfront that, like Hagar, I am not innocent in my own story, but still, in many ways, a byproduct of circumstance.

So, about Hagar. Very little is known about her origins. What we do know, from various sources, is that she was Egyptian and brought back as a maidservant for Sarai. In the Torah, rather than being named “Hagar the Egyptian,” she is referred to as “Hagar the stranger.” Stripped of identity, Hagar exists in the household of Abraham and Sarai as a servant. Of all the maidservants Sarai may have had, I often wonder what led her to choose Hagar to give to her husband. Nothing happens by chance; rather, decisions are woven from prejudice, experience, fear, and perception.

Nevertheless, Hagar was given to Abraham to conceive a child. Scripture records that her elevation to bearer of an heir made her proud, which in turn provoked Sarai. Mistreated and overwhelmed, Hagar fled into the desert. There, God met her. And though He sent her back, He sent her back with something powerful: the knowledge that she had been seen. Her cries had not fallen on deaf ears. And, this is where I am. No matter how hard, no matter how much I want to throw in the towel, in response and obedience to God, I return to my post.

Yet, God sent Hagar back to Sarai, only for Abraham to later send her away, along with her son, at Sarah’s request - Sarah who now was living in the fulfillment of God's promise! What is the lesson here? Perhaps this: life is fickle. People are fickle. But God remains the same.

What I am learning from this: God meets me in my desperation, and even though the grief is real and the circumstances often unchanged, I am commanded to go back and complete what I started. Even then, with no guarantees and a greater likelihood of further pain and human abandonment, I return time and time again, armed with the strength of El-Roi, the God who sees me.

He stoops to conquer

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The following is taken from 'The Problem of Pain' by CS Lewis:

Everyone has noticed how hard it is to turn our thoughts to God when everything is going well with us. We "have all we want" is a terrible saying when "all" does not include God. We find God an interruption. As St. Augustine says somewhere "God wants to give us something, but cannot, because our hands are full – there's nowhere for Him to put it." Or as a friend of mine said "we regard God as an airman regards his parachute; it's there for emergencies but he hopes he'll never have to use it."

Now God, who has made us, knows what we are and that our happiness lies in Him. Yet we will not seek it in Him as long as He leaves us any other resort where it can even plausibly be looked for. While what we call "our own life" remains agreeable we will not surrender it to Him. What then can God do in our interests but make "our own life" less agreeable to us, and take away the plausible sources of false happiness? It is just here, where God's providence seems at first to be most cruel, that the Divine humility, the stooping down of the Highest, most deserves praise. 

We are perplexed to see misfortune falling upon decent, inoffensive, worthy people - on capable, hard- working mothers of families or diligent, thrifty, little trades-people, on those who have worked so hard, and so honestly, for their modest stock of happiness and now seem to be entering on the enjoyment of it with the fullest right. How can I say with sufficient tenderness what here needs to be said? It does not matter that I know I must become, in the eyes of every hostile reader, as it were personally responsible for all the sufferings I try to explain – just as, to this day, everyone talks as if St. Augustine wanted unbaptised infants to go to Hell. But it matters enormously if I alienate anyone from the truth. Let me implore the reader to try to believe, if only for the moment, that God, who made these deserving people, may really be right when He thinks that their modest prosperity and the happiness of their children are not enough to make them blessed: that all this must fall from them in the end, and that if they have not learned to know Him they will be wretched. And therefore He troubles them, warning them in advance of an insufficiency that one day they will have to discover. The life to themselves and their families stands between them and the recognition of their need; He makes that life less sweet to them. I call this a Divine humility because it is a poor thing to strike our colours to God when the ship is going down under us; a poor thing to come to Him as a last resort, to offer up "our own" when it is no longer worth keeping. 

If God were proud He would hardly have us on such terms: but He is not proud, He stoops to conquer, He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him, and come to Him because there is "nothing better" now to be had. The same humility is shown by all those Divine appeals to our fears which trouble highminded readers of scripture. It is hardly complimentary to God that we should choose Him as an alternative to Hell: yet even this He accepts. The creature's illusion of self sufficiency must, for the creature's sake, be shattered; and by trouble or fear of trouble on earth, by crude fear of the eternal flames, God shatters it "unmindful of His glory's diminution". 

Those who would like the God of scripture to be more purely ethical, do not know what they ask. If God were a Kantian, who would not have us till we came to Him from the purest and best motives, who could be saved? And this illusion of self sufficiency may be at its strongest in some very honest, kindly, and temperate people, and on such people, therefore, misfortune must fall. The dangers of apparent self sufficiency explain why Our Lord regards the vices of the feckless and dissipated so much more leniently than the vices that lead to worldly success. Prostitutes are in no danger of finding their present life so satisfactory that they cannot turn to God: the proud, the avaricious, the self righteous, are in that danger.

For Phyllis...

http://weheartit.com/entry/2266173

 There is hymn I love that I don't recall hearing as a child - you are probably wondering why this is unusual?...well, my earliest introduction into 'church' was a small brethren church, then we moved to a Baptist church, and then we moved to a large Pentecostal church and in addition to all of this I was educated in a musically centred Baptist school.  So hymns were part of my upbringing which I am ever thankful for, especially considering a large chunk of my church life has been spent within the walls of the Pentecostal church where hymns are rarely sung.   The fact is, I love what is known as the traditional hymn. I love the music, I love the words....the whole package in my opinion is a truly beautiful expression of worship, which more than often exclusively focuses on Gods might, His power and His love. 

Anyway, getting back to the topic...a few years back I first heard a beautiful hymn called 'There is a fountain' (covered by Selah) and the words are so beautiful...they ooze of such an authentic God encounter.  So, last week I decided to look up who wrote this beautiful hymn.  As it turns out, the author is none other than William Cowper.  Cowper is not known in history as a great orator, preacher or a revivalist - in fact, you've probably never heard of him!  To me, I simply knew him as a contributor to John Newtons 'Olney Hymns' and the author of John Giplin. As it turns out, after reading on wikipedia there is a lot more to Cowper than I realised.  He was crippled for most of his life with mental illness, disappointment and botched suicide attempts.  I bet my bottom dollar he died thinking he lived a quiet, inconsequential life.  However, the truth is his hymns are sung all around the world and have made a great impact on peoples lives.  Cowper probably never imagined in his wildest dreams that his struggles; his walk with God (in a nutshell: just life) would have such an everlasting effect on generations to come.

My point is that so many of us go about our days, to our jobs, to school or attending to our children and think that our actions are of no consequence, when the truth is that our struggles, our questions, our faith, our walk with God does indeed echo deep into the future and our footsteps after we die will be there for generations, evident for all to see.

You are important.  The smallest of actions you take have life changing outcomes that you will never have the pleasure of knowing until eternity. Do you sponsor a child?  Do you pick up a neighbours child so they can go to Sunday school? Have you smiled at someone?  Have you spoken words hope into someone?  Written a letter? Helped with the shopping? All of these things, while they may not seem life changing to you, nor make you feel you have such a 'grand' calling...they are all life changing for that person.  That support, that restored faith, that encouragement, that meal, that car trip, that smile, that prayer...


To listen to William Cowpers beautiful hymn, click here

Love is a many splendid thing...

image by weheartit.com

I'm not totally enthralled by valentines day.  In fact, I hate it.  I resent the fact that it is boxed into romantic love.  I love, love, but wish the occasion was used to celebrate all kinds of love.

We all have many different loves.  There is of course Eros Love - the intimate kind of love that results in sensual, passionate love.  Too bad if come Valentines Day you are not engaged in this kind of love.  Please look the other way while paired up people fill the restaurants and movie theatres on February 14th with their eyes and mouths locked on each other.  What about agape, philia or storge types of love?  Are these not worth celebrating too?

I love how in the movie Love Actually they showcase a little of these types of love.  Think about Laura Linney's character; Sarah who defers her own wants and needs for the sake of her sick brother.  That is sacrificial and great love.  That is the kind of love I want celebrate.  Then how about friendship love?  Think Billy Mac & Joe.  The kind of friendship that sticks with you and sees you through thick and thin...celebrates your triumphs and holds you close through heartbreaks and failures? 

There are so many more examples of love other than eros I could give...such as the love and affection a parent feels for their child, or the close bond that goes beyond friendship between siblings.

What about the love for something that isn't flesh or blood?  A moment in time? A place?  A song?

There is a place for me that I am bound to with much love and affection.   It is somewhere that holds amazing memories.  Breathtaking scenery, dear friendships, special moments, growth and understanding, even the welcome of a new addition to our family.  Physically speaking I can return there, but emotionally speaking I will never be able to return to that place with those moments.  That love....that is held in my heart forever.  Even though it hurt to leave and say goodbye I would live that love again over and over and over!  Now that is true love!

So, what love are you celebrating this Valentines Day?

I'm a survivor

Something I've long believed was confirmed in an article I recently read: Women are better survivors that men.

The following excerpt is from the article by Ben Sherwood, author of 'The Survivors Club'

Indeed, women are much better survivors than men. I discovered this surprising fact in the woods of Washington State, where the United States Air Force trains its people in the art of survival, evasion, resistance and escape (shorthand: SERE). When I asked a hard-nosed instructor if he can tell immediately who’s got the survival instinct and who doesn't.

After putting countless men and women through very uncomfortable survival training – translation: wet, cold, exhausting and hungry – it turns out that women rule, especially moms. In this instructor’s experience, women who have gone through childbirth frequently fare better than the most strapping aviators. Under extreme pressure and deprivation, he says, the brawniest men can crumble like blue cheese while moms hang tough.

Obviously, your chances of survival depend on specific circumstances (and men definitely possess certain physical advantages), but the Air Force instructor wanted to make a point: Moms are impressively unflinching in the face of adversity. After all, he explains, moms have handled real pain. They understand sacrifice. They’re driven by a purpose greater than themselves. They’re problem solvers and multitaskers. They’re accustomed to delaying gratification. In short, they’re very effective survivors.

I love being a woman and would never want to trade places with a man.

Over the next few weeks I've decided to dedicate some posts to my favourite survivors.

Drum roll please.....here is the list:

1. Jochabed - mother of moses from the bible who risked everything to save the life of her son.

2. Lady Margaret Beaufort - matriarch of the Tudor Dynasty. An amazing survivor who risked everything for the safety and future throne of her son.

3. Catherine of Aragon - Henry VIII's first wife who would not give up her position as Henry's one and true wife.

4. Elizabeth I - born a princess, declared illegitimate at 3 years old at the time of her mothers execution. After dodging many bullets finally made it to the throne and reigned for 45 years, 4 years shy of her father, brother and sister combined.

5. Susanna Wesley - mother of John & Charles Wesley & 17 other children. She is often referred to as the mother of Methodism. There is so much about this woman I love.

6. Nigella Lawson - goddess of the kitchen, so much to say about her life!

7. Britney Spears - albeit not a popular choice. But a survivor, nevertheless!


Interestingly, all of the above are women and all (with the exception of Elizabeth I) are mothers.

I hope you tune in!

Amy xxx

To the heart of food...

A couple of weeks ago I was involved in a discussion on Real Life Radio about childhood obesity.  DO NOT SWITCH OFF...I realise most are tired of constantly reading and hearing those two words together.  But, the conversation took a turn and we got talking about food choices, food and family, food and the environment.  This is the stuff I am absolutely passionate about. Which ever way you look at it, food frames the world we live in.  Food reveals so much about culture and climate.  If you want to feel the pulse of a nation, pop down to the local supermarket and there you'll find the answer.  A quick look up and down the aisles and you'll discover how the country is doing in terms of body health and economy health.

I come from Australia, and unless anything has changed, as far as I know all our fresh meat and poultry is sourced within Australia, all vegies too (with few very irritating exceptions such as fresh garlic from China).

It is an anomaly to come across a fresh food item that is not made in Australia.  So, when we arrived in the UK and I ventured into my first Tesco I was shocked to find my trolley full of fresh produce from Kenya, Israel, Spain, Italy, The Netherlands, The Caribbean, Chile, Germany, Denmark and New Zealand (to name only a few!), which is why it will come as no surprise to you where possible I shop for my fresh food at the local green grocer and butcher.  My grocer and butcher only source produce from within a 100 mile radius of where we live, which is great news because I want to support my local farmers and the country's economy.  British farmers are a dying breed thanks to the demand for cheap food.

Foreign countries are able to produce an inferior product at much lower prices by taking shortcuts on labor and animal welfare.  For some reason we don't care....we just want the cheapest and quickest despite the fact that the corn we eat is picked by a 7 year old earning pennies for her hard labor, or the fact the meat that lands on our tables comes from farms that have no care or respect for animal welfare.  Food is expensive and whether you agree or not, good food should be a priority in your budget.  Local produce is good for you, better for the environment and fabulous for the local economy - that's your kids future I'm talking about. 


What do you know about the food you eat?  Where was it grown?  What do you know about the animal welfare standards of the meat and poultry you eat?  Has the food you eat racked up more frequent flyer miles than you?  Let's hope not!