“God, help me. I want to overcome this.”
“God, please end this cycle. I’m so tired. I don’t want to do this anymore.”
“God, help me love myself.”
These are prayers that had broken through my trembling lips on countless nights in my first year and a half as a Christian. I had made the first step: I had come to know the Lord’s love for me and the intense desire He had to be in a close relationship with me even in my broken state. This led to the proper response: reaching out in prayer even when I felt like I was being suffocated by how much I hated myself… by how completely unworthy and broken I believed myself to be. I was seeking God. I was finally trying to rely on HIS strength instead of my own. But there was still one problem: I wasn’t being completely honest with Him.
Swirling inside my mind were beliefs that contradicted these prayers. It was true that I hated the consequences of my actions and that I didn’t want to feel this unbearable weight anymore, but there was another part of me that clung to my disorder and didn’t want to let it go.
“What if I break free, but then I gain a ton of weight?”
“Who am I without bulimia? How will I manage without the sense of control I pull from it?”
“Maybe I should seek freedom once I’ve reached my goal weight.”
These were thoughts I felt ashamed of having. They lead me even deeper into self-hatred. What was wrong with me? How could I desperately want and not want freedom at the same time?
One night, after holding off on my bulimic behaviours for nearly a week (a big deal for me at the time), I broke open before God and hysterically screamed these thoughts at Him. My week of abstaining from binging and purging felt, in some ways, worse than being trapped in my usual cycle. The dark, insatiable longing I felt to engage once again—as well as the complete lack of control—seemed just as heavy. My prayers changed that night, and so did every aspect of my relationship with God. For the first time in my life I was completely honest with Him and with myself.
“God, I hate this. I want to have bulimia, but I also don’t want to have it. Why am I wired like this? I can’t do this anymore!”
“God, I know I should want to give you control, but I don’t want to. I’m scared of what might happen…”
“God, what if I hate the person I am without this disease?”
“God… Please change my desires. Please make the prayers I usually pray what I truly want… because I don’t think I genuinely want them right now.”
My honesty broke down a wall between God and me that I had been keeping there. I learned something integrally important: You can’t build a genuine relationship with God if you’re being fake in prayer. Pray out your true thoughts, and state your honest desires, no matter how broken. God knows them anyway! I had to ask him to align my desires to His before He could begin healing me. And you know what? He was more than pleased to do so. After this night I continued in honesty. No matter how bumpy or smooth the road to recovery was I knew I could pour out my true heart to God: the creator of it. The comfort that this brought me was indescribable and still is.
BE REAL with your creator today.