The other day I was cleaning off things from my iPad. I often snapshot documents, and things I want to remember until I move them to places I file. I spotted the “picture.” I sat staring at it for a long time, remembering, thinking about the day I saw it and the response it brought from deep inside me.
A few days ago, I was writing an email to Dr. Jack about my progress, I got really brave and sent it to him. Later that day, we had a phone meeting, and we discussed many aspects of my progress. All of a sudden, Dr. Jack got quiet. I assumed he was reading my email where I put down questions I have for him. But then, he said, “I am looking at this picture you sent me………I know you sent me a before picture but…….wow…. ……..Just wow….what a change.” I just responded, “Yeah, I know.”
The picture was taken at a workshop I attended for teacher training in summer. It was the summer of everything that seemed bad. It was the summer of the nutritionist calling me a liar and a failure. It was the summer of trying a three class pass for exercise programs where I was laughed at. It was the summer that I succeeded in losing six pounds on paleo after six months of effort. And then there was this picture….. It was the straw that broke me……
When I saw the picture, I started to pray really hard. I actually got in my car, went to the church, found a spot isolated and cried. I prayed so hard that day. The prayer was pretty simple. My best efforts had yielded no result at all. No one believed how hard I was trying. No one believed me. I had used every diet program. I had been labeled a failure and my only hope was weight loss surgery that I knew would fail me since the issue was not volume but something else. So I prayed….. I asked God to please help me to accept that I could not change this reality. That is the hardest prayer I have ever said. It was hard because as a teacher, I have never given up on anyone. And here I was asking God to help me to give up on me. But I knew I had to. Nothing was going to change this. I had tried with all I had and failed again, I could take no more failure, no more blows to my self worth that had reached an all time low.
I prayed every single day for the same thing and about a month later, I spotted Dr. Jack’s webinar. That part if the story is here. In the five and a half months we have worked together, everything has changed. My new prayer is one of complete thanks. I thank God everyday for mercy. I am grateful to Him for sending me Dr. Jack. Dr. Jack asked me once how I found him and I asked him if he believed in God, because as I told him, “I found you by way of a miracle. I prayed for you and you showed up exactly at the moment I needed you. And if that isn’t a miracle, what is? ”
I pulled up the picture as Dr. Jack and I were talking. He said to me, “I almost can’t believe that is you.” I know what he meant, we have both learned how the other thinks. I told him, “See that person? If you met her, she is always happy. But she is hiding a ton of pain from the world. I never wanted others to know just how low I was feeling, and all I was doing was trying to accept that there could be no more for me than what there was.”
In the months I have worked with Dr. Jack, I doubted he knew the real impact he is having on my life. He probably will never know because he doesn’t live inside here and he can’t understand the damage that was here before he showed up.
He has worked to teach me valuable lessons about my disease and how to heal my body. But the greatest gift he has given me is what he taught me about inside myself. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t a lack of willpower. It wasn’t that I lied about what I ate. It wasn’t a lack of physical movement. It wasn’t about any of that.
It was all about the right plan for the right person. The person on the right doesn’t just look better, she IS better. It isn’t just more than seventy pounds gone, it is that she has proof….vindication!! I needed a whole different approach, a different set of eyes on the problem, a doctor who believed that I can gain five pounds overnight, one who understood my disease enough to tell me exactly what things I needed. Dr. Jack has done a great job of healing my body, but the best thing he has done is to heal my heart. He fixed all those things that people thought about me, and that I thought about myself. He handed me back my hope and my power.
I thought I was finished in that photo….that I had to accept my life as it was……but he proved to me that I was wrong….I wasn’t finished at all!……..
Actually, I am just getting started!!