My heart and I have been doing a lot of reconnecting and talking lately.

I realized after lunch a couple of days ago with my friend Abby that my heart was in bad shape. Like, REALLY BAD. You want to know why?

I would beat my heart up almost every night, then seek God the next few days, where my mind is running fast toward Jesus, and I’m yelling at my poor, bruised, crippled heart hobbling along to catch up with us and run at our pace. Isn’t that hysterical??? I just picture my heart with a black eye and limping on this track, and I’m screaming, Get with the program!!! We’re moving along here!

And Abby told me so lovingly, Be gentle with your heart. 

I’ve been trying ever since. It’s not as easy as it sounds. I’m not going to lie-after 2 decades of suppression, letting all the pain and emotion out is ROUGH. My body is going through hell this season just trying to figure out what to do with these things called FEELINGS and EMOTIONS and CONTROL ISSUES. But in the best way possible, because I know Jesus is teaching me all this for a reason.

So, what does this have to do with pudding, you might ask?

Well, I’ve been realizing that I can’t just say, it’s OK, everything is fine when it’s not. Jesus will literally not allow me to stuff anymore into a bursting heart crying out for relief. So if I can’t stuff, I’ll try to distract or replace. As I just mentioned, control has been a huge problem of mine. And not just recently, but for the majority of my adult life. A lot of people don’t know this, but in addition to living through self-harm in my early teenage years, I am also a recovered/recovering bulimic. That’s not uncommon, though, for self harm to be paired with an eating disorder. At the root of both of these things is a desire to regain control. If everything around you is falling apart and out of your control, and the one thing you can control is your body, that is where you will turn. I think you would be hard-pressed to find a girl who did not struggle with some kind of eating disorder for some period of time in her life. And I say recovering in addition to recovered because although I am free because of Jesus, I suspect that control (especially in these two forms) will always be something that Jesus and I will have to walk through for the rest of my life. These things don’t magically go away.

I got done with Nav Night this past Tuesday, and felt really lonely. I don’t know why, I just did. That tends to happen to me after a lot of Nav Nights. But I sat down at my desk, and started to talk to God about it. I even started to try to convince myself that everything was fine, and to eat a pudding cup my roommate very graciously offered to me when I asked if anybody had any chocolate.

(Point of information-I am going dairy free for a while to see if cutting out dairy will help clear my face from annoying acne. So I am NOT supposed to be eating a pudding cup, and I’ve been doing really good this past week since I’ve started about not eating all the delicious things I so desperately want to eat)

Now here is where things get dicey with me. I really want to be disciplined in this, but me analyzing (quite a lot, I’d say) about what I eat starts to get into some gray area into my heart of if this is Jenna starting to try to regain control in her life again. Not to mention, with food, something I already struggle with.

So I’m kind of at a loss, or a crossroads, if you will, right now. I’m working on talking gently to my heart, and processing things in a healthy way. Self denial is a good thing. Jesus advocates for us to die to ourselves and pick up our cross. But I know myself, and I know that I have a tendency to go way overboard with things until I’m spitting water out of my lungs and begging for someone to throw me a rescue line. I pray that God will lead me through this season, and that I will come out a better person on the other side. I don’t love who I was trying to be these past few years. I want to be better.

And, you ask, did you eat the pudding cup Jenna?

No. I sat down and wrote this post instead.

~J

“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid”.-John 14:27