Being Brave

If You Only Knew: My Story (Part 3)

01.30.2018 by Nicole Kristin Twedt //

I spent quite a bit of time over the last week gushing over Jamie Ivey’s memoir, If You Only Knew: My Unlikely, Unavoidable Story of Becoming Free. (Today is release day!) Also, I’ve been telling the story of how I experienced freedom from an eating disorder in college. At the end of Part 2, I wasn’t exactly what you’d call ready to give it to Jesus. But I was close. The anthem of freedom was rising in me.

If you’re popping in for the first time, here are the links to Part 1 and Part 2. I’ll give you a moment to play catch up.

Part 3

Lucky for me, the Lord is patient. He kept giving me chances to give him my fear of gaining weight. One of the opportunities came in the form of an invitation from my roommate Monika’s cousin, Kristin. At the time, Monika and I were students in the post-baccalaureate teaching program at Western Washington University in Bellingham. Kristin invited Monika to visit her church, and Monika invited me.

Kristin’s church was interesting. It was nothing like the historic church I attended on Garden Street. A small group of people met in a rented space near James Street. The pastor was a woman, which was an awesome yet new experience. The biggest difference, however, was that the service ended with an altar call, or the chance to respond to the message or to be prayed for. Stranger still, I had a strong desire to go to the front to be prayed for. Well, kind of.

God, I silently prayed, I want to do this but I can’t. Help me say yes to you.

At that moment, the worship team switched to a song by Darrell Evans called “Trading My Sorrows.” The chorus went like this: “Yes Lord, yes Lord, yes, yes, Lord.” God is hilarious.

My bargaining with God continued. I want to be prayed for, but I can’t. If you want me to do it, you’ll have to send someone to ask if I’d like to be prayed for.

God is so great. He knew my every thought, he knew my fear. He knew what needed to happen in my heart before I could follow him. I say this because the very next moment Kristin turned to me and asked, “Would you like to go up to be prayed for?”

I walked to the front of the church to the altar area where people were being prayed for by the pastor. Many fell over by God’s power. As someone from a less demonstrative faith tradition, I was skeptical of this “slain in the spirit business.” It reminded me too much of Steve Martin’s performance as a fraudulent faith healer in the 1990s movie Leap of Faith.

There’s no way I’m going to be knocked over, I told myself.

It was my turn. I was vague about my prayer needs. I wasn’t even thinking of anorexia, or whatever I had. All I wanted was for God to take away my hearing loss. I asked the pastor for healing in general. And you guessed it, I fell backward, as slain in the spirit they come. I don’t understand what happened, even now. All I know is that I was lying down and I felt this warmth, this energy or light, this healing, spread through my entire body like electricity, only it didn’t hurt. Every area the light reached brought cleansing, healing and life to my weary body.

I could have stayed on the floor forever, except I had to visit the ladies room. Of course I had to go to the bathroom at a time like this. So, I got up, and raced to the bathroom. I had to go that bad. I also wanted to lock myself in a stall and turn off my hearing aids. I wondered if I could hear without them.

I still couldn’t hear. Nothing had changed.

What a letdown! So much for trying to follow Jesus, I thought, bitterly, as I lathered my hands with soap and warm water from the faucet. At that moment, I happened to glance into the bathroom mirror. What I saw took my breath away. The young woman looking back at me was radiant. For the first time since I was a pigtailed kindergartner at the back table with the school nurse, I saw myself as God saw me: healthy, whole and beautiful. And the voice? Well, the voice was gone; it has never, ever returned.

I’m not going to lie, despite this amazing encounter with Jesus on the carpet of a rented church space in Bellingham, I still struggled. I still messed up. I wouldn’t eat unless my stomach growled, even if it hadn’t growled in eight hours. But I didn’t feel as cold or shaky as I navigated my way through WWU’s Red Square.

Another victory happened a few months later. It’s remarkable that I was with Monika again. My roommate and I didn’t usually go to church together. On this particular Sunday, I stood in the parking lot with Monika, just outside of her Lutheran church after service. Sunlight warmed my face and a gentle breeze stirred my soul. I wanted to shout for joy. For the first time in nearly four years, I ate the wafer and sipped the wine during communion without worrying about my stomach growling first.

Years later, when I was a young mom, I read the book Search For Significance by Robert S. McGee as part of a Bible study facilitated by my friend Wendy. Suddenly the verses I discovered in college fell from my head and landed smack into my heart as I learned to replace the enemy’s lies about my body and replace them with truth. I relearned how to think and act and process the reality that I am fearfully and wonderfully made, that I am worthy and fully loved by Jesus, created to love him and be loved by him. I finally understood that only Jesus could satisfy me, and I could trust him with every area of my life.

I’ll be forty in June. I struggle from time to time with body image. What woman doesn’t? Yet I am thankful for my healthy body that birthed three children. You couldn’t pay me to starve myself. It’s no longer part of my story. Nothing is worth more than the cost of being free, not even a little black dress from Gap.

What about you? Is there a small or not-so-small thing you are holding onto? Whatever it is, dear friend, consider giving it to Jesus. He is patient, kind and compassionate. Nothing is too big for him, nothing. He doesn’t expect you to have your act together before you come to him. He is here, ready for you to come as you are. Even if deep down you don’t want to change. For years my prayer was for God to give me the desire to even want to change. If this is you, do you have someone to share your story with? If not, may I pray for you? Please leave a message in the comment section or send me an email. My email address is under the contact section. (It’s not a link. You’ll have to copy and paste because this blog is a work in progress, just like me.) I’m not a trained professional, as you know. But I consider it a privilege to pray for you.

If You Only Knew: My Story (Part 2)

01.23.2018 by Nicole Kristin Twedt //

Over the weekend I announced that Jamie Ivey wrote a memoir, If You Only Knew: My Unlikely, Unavoidable Story of Becoming Free. Her book releases on January 30. You can preorder it here. In honor of Jamie’s baby, I shared the beginning of my own story to freedom. If you missed the first installment, you can find it here.

Part 2

When spring quarter came to an end during my sophomore year of college, I’d lost a significant amount of weight on top of my original weight loss. I also lost my period. And strands of blonde hair, which fell out in clumps when I ran my fingers through it. In addition, I lost the ability to regulate my body temperature; and when I woke each morning my legs were covered in mysterious bruises. (Bony knees were the culprit.) One of the few friends I had left started calling me Twiggy, and rightly so. I was between a size 2 and size 4, but I slipped perfectly into a size 1 Audrey Hepburn-style dress that I proudly bought from Gap. I’m sure it looked more like a potato sack thrown over skinny legs and an emaciated body. But I was proud of the image reflecting back at me from the mirror on my bedroom door.

It’s important to understand that it wasn’t about losing weight at this point. I liked the way I looked. My fear was that I wouldn’t be able to maintain my new figure. I mean, I could go up a size if I ate a standard portion. What would happen if I stopped weighing myself? It was a matter of time, I reasoned, before my new jeans would get tight. What if Jesus asked me to eat a whole sandwich? Was he worth it? I prayed earnestly for the Holy Spirit to give me the desire to ask God for help.

I truly wondered if Jesus could love and accept a girl who held out on him. He gave his life for me. I hated my life. I lived to eat my daily 6 ounce carton of yogurt with granola or an open-faced peanut butter sandwich; and all I wanted to do was sleep. I dreamed of going to sleep and not waking up. I wanted to be done with the pain and emptiness caused by my secret anxiety of gaining weight. I was racked with guilt for wasting my life. Who did I think I was? My dad lost the life he loved to cancer a few years back. But still, a voice inside said I would get really fat and disappoint God and everyone else if I let my guard down, even for a moment. Still, it was becoming difficult to resist the anthem of freedom rising in me.

You see, I had dreams, dreams of being set free. God gave me the sweetest gift. At night I had vivid dreams in which I was able to cast all hindrance aside as I leapt over fallen trees in rain forests and sprinted through the African savanna amongst mighty cats and the striped zebra, full of energy, full of life. During my waking hours, as cliché as it sounds, he gave me a picture of a dark and ragged tunnel with light bursting through the far end of it. I held on to this image of hope as if my life depended on it.

I made the decision to follow Jesus Christ the summer after my seventeenth birthday at a Young Life camp called Malibu in beautiful British Colombia, Canada. So you see, Jesus wasn’t about to let me go. In fact, he was going to wait patiently for me to get over myself and follow him with my whole heart, all the while loving me with a wild and unending love. I was (and am) a child of God, and my loving father desired me to be free from the chains that bound me.

I began spending time reading the Bible and writing in a prayer journal, pouring out my heart and my hurts to Jesus. In turn, the Lord led me to discover verses from the Bible on fear that became my lifeline. Do you know how many times the Bible tells us “Do not fear. I am with you?” I’m too lazy to google it, so I really can’t say, but the idea of putting our trust in God instead of living in fear is a recurring theme throughout both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. A gem hidden in Matthew 6: “[Do] not worry about everyday life…Isn’t life more than food, and your body more than clothing?” Was this real? I mean, how did Jesus know this was my struggle?

As far as the voice, the voice that told me I was fat and unworthy, I began countering the attack by whispering “No, I will not listen to you. You are a liar. I will only listen to the Voice of Truth.”

But I wasn’t ready to fully relinquish the reins of control over food and my body, though I knew in my heart that Jesus would soon ask me to choose between him and my current ways.

I knew I would have to choose him because this was killing me.

To be continued.

Part 3

If You Only Knew: My Story (Part 1)

01.21.2018 by Nicole Kristin Twedt //

If you could see me now, you’d see that I’m doing the happy dance. I’m glad you can’t really see me. The truth of the matter is that I have stiff hips and lack even the slightest bit of rhythm and coordination required to break out my dance moves without embarrassing myself or other people. This, of course, is the understatement of the century. My cousin Jen has a DVD of Greg and me dancing at her wedding several summers back. I would pay big bucks to ensure that Jen’s wedding DVD never sees the light of day.

The reason for my excitement is that I finished reading an advanced copy of Jamie Ivey’s memoir If You Only Knew: My Unlikely, Unavoidable Story of Becoming Free. (Jamie’s book releases January 30, but you can preorder it here.) If you’ve never heard of Jamie Ivey, you’re in for a treat. Jamie is the host of the podcast Happy Hour With Jamie Ivey, which happens to be one of my favorite podcasts. Every week Jamie brings a guest onto her show to chat about the big things in life, the little things in life and everything in-between.

Instead of a traditional book review, I’m going to kinda-sorta share what Jamie’s book means to me by telling you a story; it’s my own “If you only knew” story. Though I should warn you, it’s a rather messy story of becoming free. I’m sharing it with plenty of fear and trembling.

Every story has a beginning. To understand my story, we’re going to have to go back to the early 80s when my life unravelled, just a bit. To be precise, because I always like to be precise, the story begins in 1983 at the back of Mrs. Hatchell’s A.M. kindergarten classroom at Parkwood Elementary School in Seattle, WA.

I sat at the back table with the school nurse because I’d just failed the state-mandated hearing test. Even now, over thirty years later, I remember everything about the school nurse, except her name. She was a large woman, obese really. I remember counting the rolls of fat visible through her polyester shirt. I was intrigued by the rolls of fat. I also had rolls around my middle, or so I thought. I never voiced my observation. I didn’t know that everyone, no matter how thick or thin, had some amount of skin that folds when they bend or sit. From that moment on, every time I took a bath in the white-tiled tub of my childhood, I would stare at my stomach and count them, the tiny folds of skin, and think about how I was just like the school nurse.

I changed schools in second grade. As a shy and observant child, often lost in thought, I made a unique observation one afternoon in November: Catholic school girls were skinnier than the public school girls at my old school. I was keenly aware that my calves seemed to be the same size as their thighs.

I could go on and on about my warped body image during my childhood years. But I won’t. It’s important to note, however, that even though I wasn’t actually overweight, I did have a problem. You see, I never truly learned how to properly identify hunger and fullness signals. Consequently, by the time I was in high school, I ballooned from a very normal, healthy little girl to a chubby teenager who really did have a bit of a weight problem.

By the time I was in college, in the late 90s, after struggling with body image and overeating, I lost 50-60 pounds through a Christian weight loss program that taught participants to turn to God for emotional needs instead of food. I fell in love with God all over again. I was joyful and alive. I was also a size 4. It didn’t take long for me to figure out that people treated me different now that I was thin. Men looked at me, which was a first. And clothes! Clothes not only fit, they actually looked good on me! I never imagined that I could look and feel so great. I had confidence that I never had before.

Yet fear slowly crept into my heart. I was terrified of losing what I worked so hard to achieve. I never ever wanted to be fat again. I was terrified of gaining even an ounce. I had always enjoyed food (hence the initial weight problem), but I was terrified to the point that I was willing to do absolutely anything in my power to make sure I stayed thin.

I learned through the diet to be content with eating less. I took the concept and ran with it. If I was content with half a sandwich, why not eat a quarter? Then when my body adjusted to it, I ate only a few bites. Ironically, deciding to eat less was a subconscious decision. I wasn’t aware that I was starving myself. I don’t know if my body went into starvation mode or what but soon I rarely felt hungry; and after taking a few bites I felt extremely full. In retrospect, I had to be hungry. I was so hungry that food dominated every waking moment. I wouldn’t entertain these thoughts, of course not. But my thoughts of food had to go somewhere. Really, I was obsessed with food. To alleviate the emptiness of hunger, I poured over recipes in my monthly subscription to Gourmet magazine and organized the refrigerator like a Nazi. I dreamed of meals I’d one day cook, but never eat, or drive by restaurants I’d never try.

Dear friend, I invite you to come back for the rest of the story to celebrate the release of Jamie Ivey’s book, If You Only Knew. I promise it gets better!

Part 2

Part 3