Roots

Colossians 2:7 (NLT) "Let your roots grow down into him, and let your lives be built on him.  Then your faith will grow strong in the truth you were taught, and you will overflow with thankfulness."

God seems to be speaking to me about being rooted in him, his the love, and his truth about who I am in him.  He wants me to put my faith in him and not the eating disorder which grew out the lies about who I was, or wasn't, and the chaos of my youth.  Those roots are strong, deep and difficult unearth. It is like weeding my garden. I often think the weed is gone, but it eventually grows back because I didn't get it by the root.  It doesn't help that the weeds of lies and God's truth are fighting for the same fertile soil.  Even as I enter into this season of thanks for my abundant blessings and Jesus' birth, I realize how quickly God's truth can be choked out by the lies sprouting through the surface eager to stop me from growing in him.

As my mom calls me the day before Thanksgiving to try to manipulate me into not writing about my eating disorder because it will expose her, I find myself getting pulled back and believing that if I had been a better daughter, she wouldn't have had to smack me.  If I had been brighter she wouldn't have had to go to conferences with teachers.  If I had been less selfish, she wouldn't be living in a nursing home. A good daughter would invite her mother to live with her.  If, if, if, the list could go on and on.  Although she tells me that the problem was really with her and not me, my roots grew deep down into the soil of the lies that were taught to me as truth.  I say to her, with tears spilling down my cheeks "tell that to the three year old toddler, six year old little girl, and twelve year old adolescent already buried in guilt and shame that it wasn't her fault!"  "Tell that to the young woman trying to raise her boys while you told her she wasn't a good mom."  "Tell that to me today as you still strike at me with your words instead of your hands."  I can almost hear the roots of my soul and spirit reaching and stretching into the mucky soil of lies, instead of the nourishing fertile soil the truth of who I am in God.

 I tell her I wished I had died in the eating disorder taking her shame and guilt to
my grave.  "Please don't say that," she says. "Why not?"  I reply, "then you would have nothing to worry about, not a book, not my illness, not my life." "Because I do love you and it would crush me to have something happen to you."  All I can think of is the freedom that could come of not carrying the crushing burdens I was never meant to carry.  It is this freedom that caused me contemplate life and death.

She is worried that she will be prosecuted for child abuse and thrown in jail.  I have no desire to prosecute her or seek revenge through my writing.  I really believe that as teen parents, they did the best they could raising twins.  My goal is to tell the  story of my eating disordered life, one that took me to the brink of death more than once.  Unfortunately, it is rooted in my childhood and the lies I believed was my truth.  I am finished lying and being lied to about who I am.  It is so very strenuous to reach down deep beneath the surface of my soul and spirit to kill off the roots of the lies and allow new roots to form deep into God's soil of truth that can allow me to bloom and grow instead of fade away.  How do I kill off something that is continually being planted and replanted?

I am beginning to trust that the only way to do this is to keep turning to God, knowing him and knowing who I am in him and him alone.  I must turn away from the one the sows the seeds of lies.  With out seeds there can be no more roots.  I must turn back to the one who sows the seeds of truth, back to the Lord.  He is the one that can take my faith, which at times is the size of a tiny mustard seed, and sow it in the fertile soil of truth and love and allow these roots to grow down deep into him the I can bloom into the daughter he created.  A daughter with strong roots and many branches that reach to the sky in praise regardless of my circumstance, producing fruit. Jeremiah 17:8 "They are like trees planted along the riverbank, with roots that reach deep into the water.  Such trees are not bothered by the heat or worried by long months of drought.  Their leaves stay green, and they never stop producing fruit."  A daughter that knows he will never leave me or forsake me

It was never my desire to have a broken relationship with my mother.  I remind myself that I am not the one who broke it, but it was in her breaking of my spirit that the relationship began to fray like a rope being exposed to the push and pull of friction.  As a child, their was an anchor at the end of that fraying rope never  holding me safe, secure, and steady.  It would hold, sometimes for a period of time, but I never knew when it would break free.  I always felt like I was adrift all alone and somehow I was responsible for the anchor breaking free. If only I were stronger, better, not so sensitive.... Survival took precedent over producing fruit, or in my case eating fruit.  My eating disorder became my life raft in which I could float away from the storms of my so called life.  And just like one can get lost at sea even in a life raft, I became lost in the eating disorder not once, but twice.

As I enter this Christmas season, I remind myself daily that I do not need to remain lost and rooted in the lies of my youth, but found in his truth.  My identity is not rooted in my eating disorder, but in His truth and His great love for me.  Jesus was born to die....for me!  Romans 5:8 "But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners Christ died for us" (NIV)