I am not normally a person who makes New Year’s resolutions. It is not because I have nothing to resolve, far from it. It is more that I tend to keep short accounts with myself in most areas.
I am pretty organized and use my time efficiently. As a professional organizer for years, I researched all kinds of methods, teachings, studies, webinars and the like in effort to stay abreast of the most current tools to put a home or business in order. I taught classes and webinars myself on time and paper management. I set up retrieval systems with my clients based on their inventory and their personalities so they would not only be successful in clearing the clutter of their lives, but they would be able to maintain the system once my tenure with them was over. It was important I keep my own schedule in hand so I did not get derailed by my own little things while I was helping others with their big things.
I pay all my bills well before the date due. I watch my bank accounts daily, move money efficiently, and then tithe and pay the entire month of outstanding amounts due at the first of the month.
I am usually the on time person, unless caught by traffic or inhibited by others. I live with my kids and grandchildren so I may have to run a gauntlet or two on the way out the door.
I buy Christmas and birthday gifts all year long and am not forced to purchase during the heaviest traffic nor the highest priced slots, but can bargain shop and find really cool items. The only things I usually wait to purchase near the holiday or birthday in question are the extras I can’t say no to during the season, and they are put away for the following year if they are not age or time sensitive.
When I get up in the mornings, I read my emails around 10, then not again till mid afternoon, with a final reading before bed. I task manage most business related things this same way. I don’t “handle” anything unless it is urgent and I did this even when I ran a company with a staff of 18 and 200 customers. Most things these days are not termed as urgent so they can be handled in those 3 time slots easily.
Although now that I am retired my time is a lot more flexible by choice, I still pretty much work out in my listing area from 10 till 6 daily with no breaks or lunch. If it is a sourcing day for my business instead, it is preplanned far in advance and on certain days of the week.
I do use a daily planner, have for years. I also use highlighters, paperclip sections, and stick post-its all through the thing till it looks more like a messy scrapbook. But it works.
I have certain “assigned” cleaning chores I perform daily. I vacuum on one day, dust on another, etc. I usually tend toward easy meals when I cook, and I cook normally only on certain days with planned leftovers. The leftovers coincide with the days I know I will be out of the house sourcing or running errands for a long time. I know I will have a good meal when I get home and not have to do anything but nuke it.
So staying focused, particularly in the organizing area normally comes easily for me. In doing a study years ago on the spiritual gifts, I took all the tests and so forth. It came up with the label of “administration” as my spiritual gift. It didn’t surprise me. I have pretty much always been the one with eye for detail and could implement paths of success without much thought when it came to the areas of cleaning and organizing. I was a natural leader in these areas. I was boss of it, I owned it.
But then there was the area of physical health and care.
All my life I have been the yo-yo girl. Up and down with weight, an extremist one moment, sloth the next. I have lost 40 or more pounds at least 3 times in my 60 years, always putting it back on in record time without very much effort. Whenever I was on task with the weight regimen, I would walk for exercise, or go to a gym. In an effort to make myself obey myself and subdue my wretched longing toward food sinfulness, as Paul says in I Corinthians 9:27 ASV I would “buffet my body and bring it into bondage, lest by any means, after that I have preached to others, I myself should be rejected.” I led women’s groups during the height of two of my weight loss sagas. I took on this verse as a sort of mantra, and it worked for a while. But then during some years of self reproach and general disinterest, the word buffet pronounced “buff it” morphed more into “buff fay”. I stopped walking. I stopped prepping my foods. I stopped cooking for myself and marked it up to a “busy schedule.” I am single, so with no one to cook for, eating out was the easiest solution to nourishment, or so I pretended. I do have arthritis and it is difficult to get up in the morning and head out for that brisk walk. My body groans no matter what kind of condition I am in physically. But that, like the food choices, was just an excuse….a reason wrapped up in a lie.
The truth was I wasn’t a very good boss of myself. And frankly that is as it should be for a Christian. We are not to do things by sheer fortitude and brain muscle. It might work for a while, but we are answering to the addict, and not the Counselor. God says a lot about self control in the Bible. He addresses all types, including gluttony. If He knows so much about it, you would think we would be willing to follow His leading without a second thought. But we assume we will be kinder to ourselves if we try to control everything, do it on our own plan, not bother Jesus with it. He has more important things to do than monitor our diet and exercise, right?
Last summer, I went on a 3 day sourcing trip. It was in June, the weather was scorching and it was the mid-point of the covid pandemic, but yard sales were opening up. So I attended a multi-location highway sale over one weekend with a friend. I had been very active in my estate business till the close of 2019 and had retired at the end of the year. From January till June, I was busy, but not as physically active. I was already overweight and was making a feeble attempt to get the weight back off, but had not really dedicated myself to success. We had gone through a huge home move, lots of craziness, and well…I was giving myself a break. And it proved to be a bad break with self control. Making my way through that 3 day trip was near toture.
In the months leading up to that trip, I was sitting most days for 8 hours and listing items online to sell because the pandemic had gone to priority one and we were all in lockdown. I set up my postal pick ups at the house so I was not even physically going to the post office any longer. Grocery store visits were shut down and food was delivered, so even the tiny exercise experienced during those tasks died. My arthritis woes kicked in even more because I had had a 400% increase in business during the lockdowns and was using my activity time a.k.a. walking slots for listing and shipping instead. Each day I would plan to get back on the wagon. Each day my physical body would decline. Weight rose, and all kinds of issues surfaced.
Then God sat me down even further through a knee injury after that yard sale trip. I couldn’t hold up my own weight to walk, dress, prepare food or anything for almost 5 weeks. My children were bringing me food at dinner time and helping with any other tasks as they could. I was sleeping in a recliner because it hurt too much to lie in the bed. I would stay up till 4 and 5 in the morning, finally falling into an exhausted sleep for 3 or 4 hours, then barely be able to drag myself on a walker to the bathroom and back. Showers were an hour process and even more exhausting, so they were cut down to twice weekly. Anyone who knows me knows I am a clean freak, so that was not fun.
I was sitting even more still than I did in the lockdown period by this point. I had a lot of time to think… and God had a lot to say. I am not normally a crier, but tears came often and unexpectedly. I started thinking about how I had come to my current physical condition. I realized I was experiencing MORE pain than I needed now because I had not taken care of my body prior to my injury. I may still have injured it, sure. But I would not have been down that long, scared, feeling alone. I had spent years sacrificing the important on the altar of the urgent by working on everything else but me. And God had stepped back and allowed me to be my own boss for a while.
So one day, I began to read the scripture concerning the body. My mind started to wander to secular programs on TV along with health articles. I ordered books from the library with all different kinds of food plans and techniques from paleo to pescatarian to intermittent fasting. By the time I could walk again, I thought I had this motivational gig in hand. I was gonna SLAY this thing! And then I stepped on the scale. I had gained a large amount of weight already during the lockdown, and the numbers were even higher now from my weeks of near total inactivity. Discouragement set in and I was pretty defeated in spirit.
But then God stepped in as boss once again. It wasn’t a dramatic “ah ha” moment, or a talk with a friend, TV show, or even a bible verse that wrought the desire to ask God to step in again. He just told me, in His own gentle quiet way, I was a crummy boss of me. He let me know, just through quiet meditation that there was nothing wrong with my body that a change of focus wouldn’t fix. He told me in my spirit to put down the cookbooks, turn off the TV and stop focusing on the wrong things I had been doing. Instead I needed to focus on doing more right things, then just repeating those over and over without trying to control everything. He used my own inspirational words I had given to others over the years of leading women’s weight loss discipline groups…Do the next right thing.
And a deep Godly desire to simply do right was born out of that time of refocusing between June and September. My focus was corrected, and I sat back a bit and let God do the directing.
I started to study the Bible again. I began to embrace and enjoy more of the simple things. I cut my schedule back again and as my strength returned I began walking again. 10 minutes a couple of times a week is not much in the world’s economy, but it is a lot in God’s economy. Every time I chose to do right, I was stepping to the side, staying out of God’s way, and letting Him be the boss. I selected His simple path of eating whatever I want within 1500-1700 calories a day and increased water intake a little each day. I am making it a set plan to get more sleep (still working on that one) and just enjoy all parts of life more in general. If I had been boss I would likely be paying a high price for a food plan or the ingredients of no telling what kind of dishes, joining a gym, and everything else I did when I was boss before.
Since October I have dropped 20 pounds without much effort at all. That’s the fun news to share. The not so fun fact is there are around 50 more pounds lurking that need to be shed to be physically manageable and more active without as much pain. But where I end up numbers-wise is not my focus at all. My current physical situation, my regret over not maintaining my prior losses, my increased arthritic pain…none of those are to be my focus. Where I am now spiritually in relation to Who is my boss and what He is telling me to do…that is to be my only focus. If I take care of the “do”, then the “don’t” will take care of itself.
Who is your Boss? Is it laziness, sloth, overeating, under-exercising? Maybe you drink too much, stay up too late, try to control others with your perfectionism. Are you attempting to boss those areas yourself by sheer grit and determination rather than just doing the next right thing? My future weight loss path may look like a huge task to me right now and I could get a mite discouraged. But in refocusing when I feel the urge to control, I will gain the real prize of being spirit led in this journey. My only plan is focus on Jesus, take the next single step well, and keep telling myself this can be done. According to Desmond Tutu, even an elephant can be eaten one bite at a time.
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