Not Perfect, but Good

Sometimes I catch myself wishing my life was different. I wish I was prettier. I wish I was less of a nerd. I wish I lived in the mountains. I wish I lived by the ocean. I wish I had a real couch instead of a futon. I wish I could travel. I wish I could stay home. I wish I had a glamorous writing job. I wish I was a wife and a mom. Good thing God doesn’t let me have what I wish for, or I would tear myself in half.

Yesterday was Thanksgiving. I ate a full meal, and every bite was worth it. Yet when I first saw the bowl of billowy yellow mashed potatoes, I couldn’t help thinking how much butter is in those?! That’s too many calories! I can’t eat them! And I caught myself wishing I was in a different place in recovery. God, why can’t I be past this already? I don’t want to be here – I want to be over there! In the perfect Land of No Food Fears!

It’s human nature to wish we were somewhere else. There are as many Lands as there are people.

A few days before Thanksgiving, I was scrolling through an online text of William Bradford’s History of Plimouth Plantation and read an excerpt in which the pilgrims went to explore Massachusetts Bay with Squanto. Afterwards “they returned in saftie, and brought home a good quanty of beaver, and made reporte of y^e place, wishing [127]they had been ther seated”. I know that desire well, as I’m sure you do, too: God, our soil is rocky, and planting is hard, and this bay is close to the water and has such a nice view! Bradford continues:

( but it seems y^e Lord, who assignes to all men y^e bounds of their habitations, had apoynted it for an other use). And thus they found the Lord to be with them in all their ways, and to blesse their outgoings & incom̅ings, for which let his holy name have y^e praise for ever, to all posteritie.

Yes, that bay over there might look better, more bountiful, safer, beautiful. But He appoints, and He assigns. He says, “My child, if you could see with my eyes, you would see that these rocks are beautiful, and the difficulty is good. You don’t know about the dangers of that other place”. The reality and truth is God landed me at exactly the specific place He intended for my good.

It strikes me that I am the posterity to which Bradford commends God’s praise, and tonight it’s only fitting that I echo him and send the praises back across time:  God has given me a firm place to stand. He brought me out into a spacious place.

Surely the boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places.

Thanksgiving

A few days before Thanksgiving, five years ago, I sat across from the church counselor, hugging a pillow to my stomach: “You have anorexia, Meredith – you do,” she said.

I wanted to hide from that word, that horrible “a” word. What would people say?

That Thanksgiving, I stayed in bed until 9. I got up and made a cup of chai, turned on the Thanksgiving Day parade like I used to do at home when things were normal. Everything in my two rooms looked like it always did, my prized books lining the bookshelves, all of my Beanie Babies jumbled together on my futon. Outside the sun shone, and the November wind scattered brown leaves as large as a man’s hand. It was easy to look around and pretend everything was still normal, that I was normal. But then, there were the bottles of Ensure in a row next to the television, labels ripped off so I wouldn’t know the calories.

After talking to my counselor, I had decided to move back home to Colorado. I needed help, and home seemed like it would be the answer. It all happened so fast; I would leave my apartment as it was and planned to drive back in a few months with my dad to pack it all into a storage unit. I was sitting in the airport Black Friday morning, while hordes of shoppers attacked the stores and occasionally each other.

As I waited for my last day of playing grown-up to end, I went for an afternoon walk through the neighborhood where I lived in a tiny place tucked against a colonial home. I passed windows glowing in the gray dusk, and pictured the families in the houses eating holiday dinners so close I could smell them yet torturously far away.

At home we would be taking out the turkey dishes from the china cabinet after a long year of looking at them; we would be washing the dust out of the Milkglass and the special green goblets.  I would be dancing to The Nutcracker while setting the table for turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes glazed in gravy, sweet potato casserole, green bean casserole, orange Jello with mandarin oranges, platters of deviled eggs, piles of warm bread, dishes of olives, sparkling apple cider…

But that was before. Before I could only glimpse a tableau of my former life through others’ windows. I ate part of a sweet potato for my Thanksgiving and threw the rest in the trash.

Finally the day was over. There was nothing left to do, forcing me to remember the refrigerator full of rotting food and the suitcases by the door, the evidence that things were not as normal as they seemed, that in fact the “a” word was taking over.

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Today I’m thankful to be able to draw a line between then and now, because God is so gracious. At one time I truly believed I would never feel normal again, that I would never again be on the other side of those windows, eating and enjoying eating, but finding ultimate fulfillment in loving and being loved. Yet I have! There are no words to describe how amazed I am looking back at the path of God’s faithfulness over the past five years. Though my healing is a continuing process,

my soul has been satisfied as with the richest of foods; with singing lips my mouth will praise Him… Psalm 63:1-5