Made to Crave

This summer our church is doing a series called The Ten Commandments.  The moment I heard what we were doing visions of Charlton Heston came to mind in the 1950s film - hours of my life sitting bored with my parents watching this movie as a little kid.  By the way, this is not a review of the movie, any adult movie is boring to a six year old! HA!  I'm sure it's very good, and I should probably see it again as an adult.

But the feelings that memory conjured up had me anticipating a snoozefest.  I'll admit, I half listened through the first week and doodled on my sermon notes most of the time.  Later, I felt convicted about my attitude and since this sermon series is 10 weeks long, I should probably get my act together and open my heart and mind.  So I prayed before I walked into church this week that I would be open to hearing from God, even if I already knew the 10 commandments.

Our pastor often will say (I'm paraphrasing here of course! sorry Brady) that people say they want to hear and think about the meaty, deep theological stuff, but have we put into practice the basics truths of our faith yet?  The answer most of the time is NO! I may know the 10 commandments - but am I living them out?  That's the real question.

So week 2 jumped in at the first commandment:

And God spoke all these words: I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.  You shall have no other Gods before me. - Exodus 20:1-3

 The point of this sermon was this:  We all have idols in our life.  They may not be the little stone statue kind, but you can find them by probing into your hearts a bit with these questions:

• What consumes your thoughts?
• How do you spend your money?
• What is something so important in your life that if you were to loose it, you would slip into despair?
• Who or what do you make sacrifices for?

And this hit me like a ton of bricks - there is one thing in my life that encompasses all these things and it's not God - it's my body image.

In my life I have spent tons of money chasing this ideal - weight watchers, gym memberships, shakes, herbalife, eat to live, Atkins, Paleo, I could really go on and on.  I wake up and one of the first things I do is hop on the scale.  If the scale is too high, my day starts off in a funk.  I spent a whole year training for and completing four half marathons, and yet still I wasn't satisfied.

I was put on my first diet at six years old and have been fighting this body image battle ever since.

And I worry every day that I could pass on this terrible obsession to my children, just like it was given to me by my mother.

Sitting there during the sermon, I could see that I have been a slave my whole life to this obsession.

It is my #1 idol.

It's not easy to be vulnerable to others and talk about this issue, but since Americans spend more than $60 billion dollars each year on weight loss, I figured there must be someone out there who is struggling just like me - and maybe we could encourage each other.

A few years ago, I ran across a study called Made to Crave.  I thought about buying it, but just wasn't ready to tackle this issue.  I thought I could "fix" it on my own through one more diet, but of course - I was just chasing the impossible.

Made to Crave starts off with this basic truth.  We were all made to crave.  But crave what?  There is only one thing, one person in this life that can truly satisfy us and that is God.  Yes, cravings are real and we will always have them.  We should listen to them (they are in us for a reason!), but then satisfy them with the only thing that will actually fill us - God.

I am going to walk through this study over the summer.  If anyone would like to join me, feel free to privately message me.