The Mrs. and I are making some lifestyle changes with our eating habits. Since I started serving as a pastor again, my weight has been steadily climbing - again. I have always enjoyed eating - a lot! When I was growing up on the farm, I was as skinny as a rail. Hard work and the high metabolism of a growing teenage boy prevented any fat from attaching itself to my body. But as I got older, things began to change.
After marrying the Mrs., my weight slowly began to climb. Some blessings seems to carry a curse with them. I married a great cook, but that meant I began eating better and eating more. The result was a slow, but steady weight gain. I was able to keep most of the weight off through light exercise, like playing church softball, but still it was creeping up. When the Mrs. was pregnant with our first son, she craved chocolate malts which caused me to experience significant "sympathy" weight gains. Still, I was keeping my weight below 190 lbs., so I wasn't overly concerned.
After we moved to Sioux City, I hit the magical age of 30 and found my weight was getting harder to manage. I added a bicycling commute to work to get the exercise I needed, and was still able to keep my weight down. But, when I started serving as the church planter for a new church start in Kingsley, my time to exercise slipped away and the pounds starting slipping on.
By the time we moved to Rochester, my weight was officially a problem. I went on a diet and lost a lot of weight, and started biking again to keep it off. Even with that, I was gaining some weight back over the winter - a little at a time. When I started serving as the pastor of Viola Bible Church, the biking slowed significantly and my weight ballooned again.
So, here I am with a problem and, after the Mrs. had a health scare, a new motivation to get the weight off and keep it off. Her doctor recommended she start following the GI Diet (glycemic index). So we both adopted that diet as our new eating lifestyle. The whole idea of the GI Diet is to stabilize the rate that sugar is entering the bloodstream. Some foods digest quicker than others and cause a spike in your blood sugars shortly after eating. Those are naughty foods and we were told to avoid them. Some digest slowly and are slowly releasing sugar into the blood stream. Those are nice foods and we can have lots of them.
To make a long story short, the diet is working, the pounds are coming off and I am feeling better about where our health is headed. And I don't feel hungry all the time. I haven't been eating some of my favorite foods, but I really haven't missed them. The Mrs. is really a good cook and can make almost anything taste good. Except broccoli, which is categorized as a noxious weed.
I needed some discipline in my eating habits, and now I am motivated and have been given the right instructions to do that. Our souls need discipline too. We need to meditate on the Bible and pray every day so we can hear God talk to us. It is for our own good, but it is so easy to grow lax in that discipline and just coast along.
My memory verse this past week has been Psalm 5:3, "In the morning, O Lord, you hear my voice; in the morning I lay my requests before you and wait in expectation." As I have worked at memorizing this verse, I have been blessed by it. First, the psalmist is committing himself to pray every morning to God. He is showing good discipline! But then he adds the benefit - he waits in expectation. He truly expects God to answer his prayers! Why shouldn't he think that? Jesus promised in Mark 11:24 that we could ask for anything and know that He will answer our prayer! That doesn't mean that we will receive anything we ask for; the Bible clearly teaches that unconfessed sin can hinder our prayers. Barring that, when we are earnestly seeking God's will on an issue, we can "wait in expectation" for an answer.
Let's not pray and wonder if God will answer it. Let's pray and ask God to reveal His perfect plan for us and "wait in expectation" for the answer!
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
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