** This didn’t make it into the book. “Feels forced.” **
Today happens to be Good Friday, 2009. I didn’t think about the connection between the day and the early content of this book when I woke up this morning.
All I thought about was that we wanted to get the page count up to 224 for printing purposes, and that I was torn about how and what to offer by way of update on my journey.
You see, the outcomes aren’t as critical as the obedience. I keep saying that. But I’ve been resistant to giving a real update about me, and have been hiding behind the outcomes and obedience argument, because I have been afraid that, for some people, my continued struggle and lack of success at losing weight would diminish the credibility of the rest of what I’ve said about God.
This morning I weighed 398. And I’ve been working hard. I’ve been to doctors, nutritionists, trainers. I go to the gym. I eat well. I lapse and get bored. My metabolism is slow. I try again. I fail again. I keep coming back.
I cry sometimes. I feel hopeless sometimes. I have fought a long battle, and the battle drains me.
But I know who stands with me, and I know how the war turns out.
Nah, strike that. This battle is hard, and I have hope about how things might turn out, but that’s not really the point, and that’s not really what I think about.
Here’s what I’ve really been thinking about, really been torn about. On Monday I’m meeting with a bariatric surgeon. I am planning to have gastric bypass surgery.
I didn’t want to tell you that. In my errant thinking, that sounds like taking the cheater’s way out. In my head, that means I won’t be able to say that I lost the weight. Instead, I feel like I’ll have to say that the weight “came off.”
As though the important thing is how I earn some victory lap after the fight. As if the lap is the point. As if the victory is the point.
Those things may be fun blessings, but they are not the point. Too many people suffer too many things, and too many people die in too many ways for that to be the point.
The point is my life, shared and mingled with Father, Son and Spirit.
On this Good Friday, I’m struggling letting Jesus have my failures and my shame. Expecting him to take that junk from me is so, so unfair.
But it feels like he can’t mix his life into mine until I free up some room in my world by giving some more of myself to him.
He seems to want the mess.
He seems to invite the scars. Especially today. Jesus with stretch marks.
And if Jesus takes my scars upon him, I’ll soon be adding three laparoscopic incision scars. If my flesh is somehow his flesh, then Jesus is getting bariatric surgery.
I didn’t want to tell you that.
I wasn’t going to tell you that, actually.
Then I went to a meeting this morning, and I heard someone say, “He told me that if my life was an open book I’d be free, but I don’t think I want to tell everyone about the farm animals.”
I know that’s not an appropriate church joke, but this is the epilogue and I think the line is hysterical.
For me, the admission of my continued failure, and my choice about having the surgery, are disclosures that feel like farm animals. They feel like sharing too much. They feel like things for which you’ll judge me, or for which you may discredit the rest of what I’ve had to say.
I wish I could say that I didn’t care about such things. I do.
But not enough to start lying now. Not enough to hide myself. Certainly not enough to hide myself and then blame the secrecy on not wanting you to get tripped up in your interaction with God. I wrote the Priest chapter, after all, I should at least act like I’ve read it.
And I’ve met enough of you in person or in email to know that for as scary as this is, I’m going to receive love for sharing it.
The Father is the lover, the Son is the beloved, and the Spirit is the searching love that passes between them. I am invited into that embrace. And so are you. And so when I trust myself into that embrace, it should be no surprise that the Spirit that searches us both connects us in love.
Thanks in advance for that. Thank you that the more you trust your own “farm animal” truths to the embrace, the more overlap you and I have. Thank you that when you give your shame to Jesus, you build a connection with me and I experience more love. Thank you that you offer your scars to him, and that you transpose your story — the one that is told in your body and in your heart — upon him, and that your story and my story are both told then in his scars.
What an amazing, beautiful, scarred and glorious story of shared life and love hangs on this Cross before us on this Good Friday!
I think I’m going to stay here for a while.
I love you.
Pete
…Continue to Discussion Materials…
3/10/10 Update. I spent the rest of 2009 jumping through hoops for the surgery. Haven’t been approved yet, but I’m down quite a bit of weight and feeling good. Am beginning to believe that God may be interested in walking me through a long hard fight, and there could be great joy in that. No conclusions yet…still waiting to see how insurance forms move through the system, and I’ll make my choice when it’s mine to make.
