BRAVEHEARTS

RADICALLY REDEMPTIVE RELATIONSHIPS – FINDING COMMON GROUND FOR THE SAKE  OF LOVE

https://youtu.be/Stay Skinny or Stay Hungry?OMKJOZpYOa8

When my daughter became sick, I could hardly comprehend the reality that she – my wild child, joy of my life – was ill with a disease that kills more young woman, between the ages of 17-23, in our country than any other disease.

I love this picture of Kristin. It brings back memories of hours of Kristin riding her two-wheel bike, without training wheels, up and down and up and down our front sidewalk for hours, determined to learn to ride her own “big girl” bike. That memory leads to others of Kristin determined to bake cookies, even though her mother couldn’t; of a 14-year-old freshman deciding to smile at every student in her new public high school – determined to make friends; of Kristin training to do a “giant” swing on the uneven bars in gymnastics until her body literally went limp and she had to be carried home; of Kristin going to high school at 6:30 a.m. and not returning until 10:00 p.m. because she was hell-bent on not talking about or even considering the tragic breaking of her childhood home into a million little pieces all around her. This girl has some “stubborn fight” in her.

Kristin went to her “dream school” in San Diego, CA and came home at mid-term her freshman year – having lost 30 pounds, all interest in anything, and even the desire to live. Either way she was living under the banner of emptiness.

Anorexia. Her 101 pounds screamed so loudly that I couldn’t hear what I really knew, “The great preoccupation we have with food and shopping and appearance, in turn, is no less of a genuine focus on hunger – indulging it, understanding it, making decisions about it – than it is a monumental distraction from hunger” (Carolyn Knapp, Appetites). 

I don’t know what was harder – knowing that Kristin was starving, literally to death, or knowing that she was so hungry that she could no longer eat.

During this video cast I get an opportunity to to hear some of my daughter’s story – to bear a little more witness to her own decade-long struggle to escape the “death camp” of eating disorders.

I know there’s something about food and hunger that pull us to God with a force that is powerful. He told us, “I am the One who made you hungry, so that you would know that man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes out of the mouth of God.“

We’re all hungry. The quality of our lives is determined by what we do with that hunger.

I am beyond grateful to tell you today that my daughter has chosen to stay hungry . . . to use her gifted athletic ability to become strong, to learn to speak Spanish, to champion others who have no advocate, to fight her perpetual anxiety by getting back on that “bike” and riding it until the unanswered questions fade and the one truth she chooses everyday remains, “I choose life.”

Tags: Anorexia, Choose Life, Hard Work, Healing, Heartache, Hunger, Live Full, Radically Redemptive Relationships, Skinny, Strong