“Know therefore that the Lord your God is God; he is the faithful God, keeping his covenant of love to a thousand generations of those who love him and keep his commandments.”
Deuteronomy 7:9 (NIV)
Our pastor, Pastor James Sunnock, released his first book, Living Free, and when I bought it earlier this year, I asked him to autograph it for me. Part of his autograph talked about how “our Father is always faithful.” I was slightly stumped about that because I think of myself choosing to be faithful to obey the commands God gives me to fulfill, but I don’t really think of God being faithful to me. I’m His servant, He’s my Master – why does He have to be faithful to me? But, isn’t that just like God to use His power to bless us and our lives when we should be focused on worshipping Him?
God, in His love, a few months later, showed me through actions a smidgen of what my pastor was referencing about His faithfulness. I’ve shared multiple times, probably more times than you care to hear, about my struggle with food addiction. Last April, approximately one year ago, I must have had a heart change because God was able to start making progress with me in this area. He took me through several periods of fasting, each different lengths and each giving up slightly different things to help me begin to break the stronghold I have on food. While some went better than others, I faithfully worked my way through them and obeyed to the best of my human ability (which, on some days, didn’t look like obedience at all).
However, then the struggle came back. I stopped fasting, I didn’t hear that I was supposed to fast again and my struggle became real again quickly. I realized I wasn’t healed… I had merely been working on symptoms, not the root cause. So, I went back to my Father and started another conversation with Him. First, He answered me that He was all I needed for healing – I didn’t need to look for answers in books, other people – I just needed to listen to Him. Okay, I’ve learned how to trust Him, so I knew if He was all I needed, then that worked for me. Then I waited for a few more weeks.
Last weekend I started up another conversation with Him. This time I asked God to reveal to me the root of my issue. I knew it wasn’t that I enjoyed the food. Not all of it anyway. Most of what I ate, I did purely for emotional reasons. I was upset… I ate my feelings. I was sad… ate more feelings. Happy? You guessed it – let’s eat some feelings. Not enjoying the process, the taste or the feeling afterwards. I wanted to break that cycle but knew it would take understanding and healing of the root first. So I asked. This time He didn’t make me wait long at all. The answer was almost immediate in the form of some memories. He showed me exactly when the root was planted, how I watered it… and then He let me sit (or maybe I was afraid to continue our conversation just then) on that reflection for two days.
Come back next time and I will show you how God showed me His faithfulness to finish our conversation, in what feels like once and for all.
© Cheri Swalwell 2017