The Ulcer

It's been a while since my last post.  A long, painful month with what's being treated as an ulcer.

I've spent most of my life feeling like I'm not normal, or like there's something wrong with me.  Ugly, undesirable, etc.

So I cling to the familiar.  I cling hard to it.

An ulcer means at least a temporary change in diet, and likely some lifelong changes if I wish to avoid future dealings with it.  In one way, I was already moving towards healthier eating, but in other ways it is deeply frustrating for me to have to further rewire my brain.   I mostly want to be left alone to enjoy the things that the people around me enjoy on a regular basis.  I adore tomato based foods, for instance. But it riles up my stomach, can give me amazing acid reflux to the point that I've awoken in the night and needed to vomit acid and barely digested food back up.

Red meat, a lot of favorite fast foods.  I have to be careful with citrus.  So fruits I was just discovering are now a bit dangerous to me.

I just want to be normal.  This is the thing in my mind and heart I must learn to recognize and resist.  I'm certainly not the only person with sudden dietary restrictions in my life, and there are some who will get it worse.  So I'm trying to not write this with a spirit of complaining.  Just as I am trying to enter into this new phase of life with thankfulness to God, instead of with frustration.

Food, of course, has nothing to do with whether or not I am normal.  It is just familiar to continue eating what I want to eat.  And familiar things are comfortable things.  Things that taste good are fun things!  Not being an inconvenience to others when we hang out is comfortable.

I am loathe to give those things up.

But underneath all this, I am coming to believe that this ulcer episode is a gift.  It is corrective, yes, and I am reaping something I have sown through the use of painkillers and bad diet choices.  But it is forcing me to eat better, to reevaluate my diet on the whole, and to think through the purpose of food and eating.

Oh, Lord.
Help me to be thankful and deliberate.

Who is Betraying Who?

This morning I was reminded of Jesus saying, "The spirit indeed is willing but the flesh is weak."

This morning I was thinking of it in terms of the physical ailments that I'm currently trying to work through.  There is something wrong with my stomach, perhaps an ulcer, that is making cardio nearly impossible for me.

But I want to be out running and walking so bad.

It is frustrating, even depressing if I'm not careful with my thoughts.  When I fell into a depression at the end of last year and started binge eating again, I think I helped that ulcer along with a ton of soda.  So much acid.  I'm surprised I have a stomach left.  I was also nursing a hurt shoulder, so I wasn't even going out to lift weights for a while there.

Of course, becoming a sedentary recluse reduces one's fitness level to jell-o.

The temptation is to blame my body, like its "other" or somehow totally separate from me.  Like it left me at home to go out partying over Christmas and came back wrecked.  "Sorry bro, here's the keys back!"

No.  This is rooted in a spiritual problem.  I had the keys, I was behind the wheel.  I was feeding tar into the oil intake, pouring bourbon into the gas tank.  I blew the engine by filling it with crap.

There are any number of factors at play when I got depressed.  The first is that I suffer from depression.  I'm prone to it, to melancholy, to the gears grinding to a halt.  The other factors are things everybody is worried about: being unemployed, paying bills, managing my health without insurance, being a good husband in the context of those circumstances.  Christian culture places an ungodly, perhaps unbiblical premium on the working husband who provides everything for his family.  Its a pressure I grapple with constantly given our current situation.  My health limits my options somewhat, and there's not a lot of work in my field around here.

It is easy to spiral if I'm not vigilant.

And I wasn't.

The truth is, my body didn't betray me.  I betrayed it, and after doing so well for most of last year.  Its such a little thing to just get that one soda, that one candy bar, that one bag of chips.  And in your mind, that's all it is, right?  And that's all the next one is, too.  And the next, and the next.

For those of us who manage stress with food, we dimly chip away at the cliff we're standing on until it gives way totally, forgetting the whole picture in favor of what's right in front of us.  Sometimes we survive by getting sick, or injured, or scarred.  Some of us don't get away unscathed.  Its the massive heart attack we didn't see coming.

We must manage it differently.

We must become more intimate with Christ.  We don't need to pray, "better."  We should pray at all.  Truly bring him in, voice our fears, cast our cares, be willing to accept his provision and Lordship.

If we do not make Christ lord of our fears, our fears will become Lords over us.

Why Fitness?

This morning, a friend and I were discussing something similar to this, and I thought it might make a good post.

Why work out?

Motivation is probably one of the hardest things to initially find and sustain.  As soon as I injured my shoulder last Fall, I started to decline my gym time, and eventually fell totally out of shape.  And it was a habit I had been building for months!

So what might fitness look like under the Lordship of Jesus?

Well, some quick thoughts:

• We know that our bodies can do incredible things.  I don't think that means it is mandatory to do achieve those extraordinary limits, or that doing so means God is giving someone who is super athletic a little extra lovin'.  But I do think he is pleased when we do decide to take a run at our limits.  For some of us the interest in that is fitness related, either exclusively or as one of our many interests.  For some of us it's artistic or other skills.  But at the least, I think God is pleased when we push our bodies.  He designed them, after all.  If I built a hot rod, I'd want to see it run hard and free on a long stretch every now and then.
• I think we can deduce that, though we all have varying abilities, there is a point where the way we treat ourselves physically goes from "okay" to "damaging ourselves."  The latter is a space that I personally felt convicted about recently.  God gave me this body, it's the vehicle of my existence, and I do things that just abuse and break it down, but which never result in building it back up.  Sure, working out tears down muscle, but that's so the muscle can build back up and be stronger.  But damaging my heart and blood vessels and arteries through unhealthy eating choices and a sedentary lifestyle isn't the same thing.  I wouldn't be so bold as to preach from a pulpit that for everyone it is sin to fall into such physical disrepair, but I believe it was for me and I'd encourage anyone to pray about it and examine the attitudes that may be putting them there, barring any health or injury factors like thyroid problems that may be contributing to limit them, or make fitness goals more difficult.
• I think, personally, that at the least a healthy diet and a maintenance style exercise routine are God honoring and even worshipful.  I think for those who enjoy being athletic, there can be personal moments of worship and God glorification that happen when they achieve new fitness goals, just as an artist may feel that way in learning a difficult song, finishing a painting, or a mathematician may feel while working through difficult equations.

Those are some of the things that are forming my kind of, Theology of Fitness.  What about you?

--H

Silly Confessions: The Story So Far

Hi.  My name is Harlan.  I presently weigh around 325 lbs., and have weighed as much as 370.  I suffer from high blood pressure issues, and I am an emotional, sometimes destructive eater.

I've been overweight for most of my life, but in 2012 I lost 50 lbs.  It happened via a combination of a strict diet, exercise, and enthusiasm.

Then I hurt my shoulder.  Around the same time, I was forced to seek medical care from new providers, who changed my prescription, and added a new one for Prozac.  In retrospect, I believe that a combination of no longer feeling well from a suddenly different blood pressure medication, which was now a lower dosage, and reacting poorly to Prozac, sent me spiraling a depression that lasted through the last few months of the year.  Bad food that I had already suffered through withdrawing from was suddenly in high demand, and I stopped going to the gym due to not feeling well in general and my injured shoulder.

I held my own for a while, maintaining my weight, but then slowly began putting a few pounds back on.  Meanwhile, my overall health was deteriorating.  Finally, I recently sought different medical care and was returned to my old prescription, and I've started feeling better, though it feels like it's going to be a bit before I really feel stable again.  I'm also preparing to start working out again, though that will definitely feel like a, "starting all over again," scenario.

But that's okay.

Over time, I'll delve more into the spiritual journey I've been on over the last ten years.  I am a follower of Jesus Christ, I identify with the PEARUSA Anglican movement, I have an Undergraduate degree in Communications and Bible.

It is second nature to me to think theologically about the world.

I decided to start this blog because of a prayer I prayed tonight.  Earlier in the day I picked up a cheap, store brand version of Hamburger Helper Beef Stroganoff.

I love that crap.

So.  So much.

I fixed it, and ate it.

Listen, Hamburger Helper is a horrible thing to eat if you have high blood pressure.  Especially if you eat the entire box.  As I usually do.  Oh, I may not always use a whole pound of meat, but that doesn't matter.  I inhale all of the noodles and sauce.  It almost always makes me sick, it's certainly not healthy, but I'll pick it up and eat it every now and then, anyway.  And the thing is this:  I know it's bad for me.  But when I see it, the sensible part of my brain shuts off and I buy it anyway.  Sometimes, like today, the bad part of it never even crossed my mind.  It was cheap, and we're not exactly rolling in cash, and my wife was doing things with friends, so it seemed like a no brainer.

And it was.

It was at least brainless.

It's been warm this weekend.  Uncharacteristically warm for this time of year.  So when I got back to our apartment complex, I decided to sit on the swing in the courtyard and enjoy it before South Carolina remembers that its winter and drops an ice snap on us.  It was there that my brain acknowledged the uneasy feeling that had been rattling around it's flooded basement for most of the night.

I had sabotaged myself.  Again.

I recently told my wife that I felt the urge to confess to her that my poor health choices stemming back to well before I ever knew her were things I should repent against, and that I should ask her forgiveness.  They were choices that were threatening us, after all, in the form of my poor health and stress.

On the swing tonight, I began to view it on a broader scale.  My health choices are sins against my own body, and sins against the Lord.  Now, if someone had told me this, I'd have probably thought it was ludicrous, but the benefit of having got to it under my own power made it hit home.  Made it reframe reality.

It goes like this:

I am made through Christ (Jn. 1:3), and I am reconciled through Christ (Colossians 1:17-20).  When I continue to consume harmful things that make me sick, and over the long term damage my body, I am damaging something that was made by and through God, and which has been reclaimed by Him.  Reclaimed not for further abuse and brokenness, but for restoration and health insofar as I am capable.

I don't think this is just about a list of things that are sins.  I think this is about how we are in relationship to everything and everyone around us.  We are in relationship with food.  And it is not unlike being in relationship with people.  If you hang around people living damaging lifestyles, you will get caught up in it.  For the first time tonight, I stopped thinking about all of this in terms of just making myself cease to eat some things.  I thought about it in terms of repentance and relationships.  Repentance can mean to turn towards, not just turn away, and so I have to step away from relationships with food that are harmful to me, and and turn towards relationship with food that is good for me.

These relationships affect other relationships as well.  If I continue to damage and poison my body, I threaten to bring darkness and even death to my marriage and my friendships.  Especially in terms of my wife, I do not honor her by acting this way.

I don't have all the answers.  But I did take a step forward tonight, and I invited our Lord to enter into my relationship with my health.  I think a lot of the time we compartmentalize that as something that isn't particularly spiritual, and don't consider that Christ has domain over this as well.

So if you think this is interesting, stick around.  I hope to spend time exploring this further here as I continue to pray and reform my eating and fitness habits, trying to get the rest of my weight off and reorder my life.  Perhaps I'll share some of those prayers here, but mostly I'll be asking questions and reasoning my way through a new way of thinking about my relationship to the world, and the Lordship of Christ.

Pax Christi,
H