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.