“Your love, Lord, reaches to the heavens,
your faithfulness to the skies.” Psalm 36:5 (NIV)
Last time we were together I shared about how God, in all His goodness, didn’t want me wondering what His faithfulness looked like, and knowing the type of personality He created me to have, decided to show me in a wonderful way instead of just having me learn about it. He gave me heart knowledge when He could have settled for head knowledge.
After asking God to show me the root cause of my emotional eating, and Him answering me with memories which put the pieces of the puzzle together, I sat in that answer for 48 hours, asking what He wanted me to do next, but not really taking any active steps to sit quietly and hear an answer. Not yet.
Two days later, I sensed it was time. I was missing Him more than usual. It’d been a busy day, emotional for different reasons, and I just wanted my Daddy. I took advantage of a quiet house, chose to stop working and was ready to finish our conversation. I asked Him the question, “Lord, what do You want me to do with the information You gave me on Saturday? You revealed to me the hole I have which in the past I’ve always tried to fill up with things which don’t work. Activities, other people. None of those things are permanent solutions and I’m ready for this hole to be filled in once and for all. I’m at the point in our relationship where I crave spending time with You, filling up not just daily but continually with Your strength, but this, this hole? I’m ready for this hole to be filled once and for all, completely sealed tight. How do you want me to seal it completely so I don’t keep running to food as a cheap substitute?”
God knows our hearts… better than we know them ourselves. I think He knew the sincerity with which that prayer was prayed. He and I had already spent the previous eight months working on food issues through a series of fasting so He knew I was willing to obey… but I couldn’t do it on my own. His answer came in the form of an image. It was of a giant hole in my heart in which He put potting soil (the kind with the rich minerals that you can see – the good kind, not just ordinary dirt). Into that potting soil, He planted a bright blue flower, fully grown, already in bloom, dead center of the filled hole.
Now that image might seem weird to you. Why would I want to see a bright blue flower, in potting soil, sticking out of my chest? It was then that I knew. He filled the hole completely for me, right then, and watered it over the next few days, filling it with more potting soil until it was packed down… completely sealed.
While God healed completely in that moment, I knew my responsibility was to walk in that healing… and I could simply enjoy filling up with His strength on a daily basis without wasting my time filling a hole with the wrong stuff.
During my quiet time the next morning, I had a niggling feeling I was missing “the icing on the cake.” I looked up the meaning of the blue flower, knowing God doesn’t do things by chance and so there had to be significance as to the flower He chose to bloom inside my heart. I’m not a flower expert… but I could still picture the image of the flower He chose so clearly, so I thought I would try and Google it.
I Googled “daisy” although even though that flower was close, it wasn’t it completely. Up popped the exact picture of the flower I saw in my mind, and it was a Gerber daisy (I didn’t even know there were more than one type of daisy). And the meaning behind the Gerber daisy is this… cheerfulness. The meaning for English daisy was given too… innocence.
The reason that is so personal? God gave me the word JOY for 2017. He chose this year, the year of JOY, to plant cheerfulness in my heart as He healed an addiction I’ve carried for almost four decades. He gave me back the innocence of my childhood and freed me from the slavery of food once and for all. It’s my responsibility to continue to walk in that freedom and enjoy all food that He has given, but He is the One who gets the glory for the healing.
Come back one more time as I share the last part of this journey with you.
© Cheri Swalwell 2017