Scales, Salads and Skinny Jeans
What do scales, salads and tight jeans all have in common? My hostility. I loathe them all!
I know I’m not alone in my issue with scales. Just last week I overheard a woman at a doctor’s office refuse to get on the scale and plead with her nurse to use the weight from her most recent visit. She told her every woman should get a pass from the scales at least once a year. I chuckled at her debating ability. But I get it. I battle it too. I feel as though scales reduce my value to a number, which can fluctuate greatly depending on the time of day (and month).
Salads, on the other hand, are the bane of my existence. Ok, so I am being dramatic, but honestly I would rather go hungry than eat a salad. I hate them and I hate that I hate them. I am health conscious. I am supposed to love a good salad. It would make my life easier, give me a healthy, low-calorie meal option. But no. It’s never going to happen.
Which leads me to tight jeans. Because I try not to weigh frequently, I rely on my skinny jeans to keep me on track. I trust them to be a more accurate assessment of my health than the scales and I try to listen to them when they gently tell me I need to re-evaluate my choices. So, while I hate it when my jeans get uncomfortable, I have come to appreciate the motivation that comes with them when they do. They remind me how easy it is to float downstream when I simply wanted to enjoy treading water.
This same thing happens to me in my spiritual life more often than I’d like. It’s not a conscious, spoken-aloud statement declaring my complacency with my spiritual health. It’s more like “I love wearing these jeans; they make me feel good and so I can quit working on making them fit tomorrow or next week or next month.” And before I know it, my soul is starving, I’m complaining more than I’m praising and I am focusing more on my worries than the Word.
Anger, frustration, anxiety - these are God’s way of telling me that there is no such thing as standing still in this river of life. These are God’s way of telling me my jeans are tight. Just like I can’t expect my skinny jeans to always fit me perfectly without diet and exercise, I also need to paddle hard to stay afloat in the spiritual river of life.
The key is to pay attention to our tight jeans and our emotions. Our body and spirit tell us what we need. We just have to be listening.
How do you overcome seasons of complacency in your physical and spiritual health? I’d love to know, just in case skinny jeans go out of style!