God always answers prayer. Sometimes the answer is obvious; its the answer you are looking for. Other times, He might act through circumstances to answer your prayers. Often times the answer is NO. I believe that we will someday understand the reasoning for God's answers, but it is rarely in the present. A prayer of mine for the past year is for God to give me a biblical understanding of food and health. I have been uncomfortable with my weight since I was a child. We won’t travel back to the root of the issue today, but let’s just say that I feel like I missed out on a dose of self-esteem and instead had my entire self-worth wrapped up in my weight. My junior year of high school I topped out the scale at over 200 pounds; I am a measly 5 foot 4. I was classified ‘morbidly obese’ and felt that way too. Through following the Weight Watchers Program, I lost about 55 pounds during my senior year of high school. While I felt great, everything about my self-worth was still contained in that number on the scale.
I love cooking, baking, and eating. I’m not afraid to admit that I am a complete foodie. Within the last year, I’ve felt negatively about my bipolar relationship with food. I love tasting and eating everything, but at the same time I feel poorly about those tendencies because I think sometimes I can get out of control and my thoughts and actions become sinful and gluttonous. About a year ago, I began to ask God to guide me to a biblical understanding of food, my health, and my body. God has answered that prayer by guiding me to the understanding that He created me and He finds me beautiful. Through reading scripture I found that I should find my worth in Christ- He makes me beautiful from the inside out.
So let’s make the next part of this story really short. I’ve been having some health issues and concerns. After feeling terrible for too long, I started going to some doctors to try and get to the root of the issue. Yesterday I was diagnosed with Interstitial Cystitis. Annoying and complicated name, right? Basically, IC is a chronic lifetime condition of the bladder. Without going into too much detail, my bladder lining is not behaving like it should and its causing me a lot of pain, discomfort, and inconvenience throughout each day. IC never goes away, but I can manage it with medication and diet. So far the medication's negative side-effects are winning, but with time the medicine should have the intended affect and help repair my bladder. The diet I have to follow strictly is to avoid acidic foods and anything processed- this means no coffee, no diet coke, no tomatoes, and no to a lot of other things. The trip around the grocery store is pure comedy- I feel like I can eat about 10% of what the store contains.
It seems a little cruel to think that God would inflict me with a “chronic lifetime condition” because of my prayer to understand food, and I really don't believe that He did. Personally, I really feel like it is one of those things that just happens. My response during this time- my attitude, my respect of my body and this condition, my decision to cling to Christ and let Him guide and strengthen me through this challenge is really what it all comes down to. I do feel like if I approach my IC with the right attitude, I will come away with a better understanding of food and being healthy. While I will miss tomatoes, onions, lemons, and limes, there is plenty of other produce that I can eat. I can’t eat most packaged breads, but I love baking fresh bread in the bread machine. It’s difficult to think of a positive to going without dark chocolate and coffee, but I am sure that I will manage. It’s definitely time to come to an understanding of what is healthy for me. Hopefully, with time, patience, and attention, I can come to a healthy understanding of the food I can eat and the body God has blessed me with. For now I’ll take it one day at a time and hopefully learn to cook and bake things that both taste delicious and help me get to a place where I have more good days and less bad days.
