So it’s Sunday and for the most part every Sunday I go to church. Now I like church. For me it’s not this boring thing you do to hopefully appease the gods, but instead it’s a place where I find strength, and peace, and hope. There’s just something so powerful to me when people of the same belief come together and stand shoulder to shoulder seeking to worship and understand more about their creator. Anyway, this morning I woke up and was completely dragging my feet while getting ready for service. Instead of looking forward to being in fellowship, I found myself debating whether or not I should just skip it for the day. Well of course I went and about half way through the sermon it dawned on me what my issue was.
You see, for most of my life I’ve been very introverted. I love to spend time with people but because 99.9% of the time I make some sort of an idiot of myself in front of others, I tend to shy away from too much interaction. Well, contrary to my normal position, this week I’ve been very social and put myself out there in a lot of different ways. It’s been really fun…but it’s also been very stretching. In fact most nights I come home and journaled about how foolish I felt or what type of failure I must have come across as.
Today in his sermon my pastor said something along the lines of “Don’t allow your faults to keep you back from serving God” and although he was talking more about our spiritual relationships, I realized that it was this exact attitude that was keeping me from wanting to go to church today. Like pretty much everyone else in this world, I want to be accepted and I seem to think that in order to be so I have to be perfect. I don’t go to church with perfect people, I don’t work with perfect people, and I certainly don’t have a family full of perfect people…. So why is it I think my faults are the very reason to not even attempt to form real relationships?! Why do I look to run away instead of run to the very things I need the most?
I also think it’s this same dynamic of perfectionism that so much entangles me in my weight loss journey. Over the past several months I have found myself caught up in this cycle where I start realizing that I don’t live up in any way to this standard that society or just people in general have. So I subconsciously turn to food for some sort of comfort. Then after eating my way through a whole bag of chips or enough take out to feed a small family, I feel even worse about myself. Which in turn leads me to seek comfort again….which is usually with more food (although it’s more of a subconscious decision)…and the cycle continues. When will I learn to seek comfort in things that actually satisfy and break the cycle?
Jess
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