If You Only Knew: My Story (Part 3)

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.