Hell, thy name is Sugar...

Day #4...

When they tell you the first few days of eliminating sugar intake are "no fun", don't believe them.

They are wretched. 

Getting a root canal is "no fun".  Waiting at the DMV and dealing with humorless zombies behind their little windows of self aggrandized power,  is "no fun".  Enduring most of the depressing line up of British voiced narrated TV shows on PBS that my husband seems to love... is "no fun." (and don't get me started on that insipidly boring travel logue guy who has NO RIGHT to get paid for trekking the world and making the most exotic destinations seem unbearably dull). 

I have experienced plenty of things that are "no fun."  Plenty, indeed.  But this sugar detox thing... that belongs in a whole different category:  something more akin to, oh I don't know, hellish torment?

Truly, I don't mean to make light of the reality of hell itself.  I know it is far worse, and I don't mean to suggest that what I am going through can begin to compare to the real suffering that is taking place on earth, even as I write.  If anything, I guess you could say I am merely shedding light on my true, wimpy nature.   I hate suffering.  I really, really, do.

What's more, in these excrutiatingly looooong 3 days, I have become painfully aware of the fact that there is something I hate even more than suffering.  I hate being told "no".  I loathe restrictions, in any form.  Even self imposed ones, which is why I hardly ever impose them on myself. Limitations are just so... limiting, you know?  So I hardly ever set them, rebel that I am.   This is an ugly, ugly thing to face. 

Simultaneous to all of these egregious epiphanies, however, is something I haven't been talking a lot about since I started this journey, but another quiet reality that trumps all of the afore-mentioned "hell'ish" revelations, and is sustaining me through my whining and complaining, even this very second:  the Grace of my Lord Jesus Christ.  In a way it seems silly, and even irresponsible to squander such a priceless treasure on something as pedestrian as dealing with a sugar addiction.  But then I remember these words:

"I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be attained through the law, Christ died for nothing!"  Galatians 2:21

 

And there it is.  I need his Grace-  beginning with salvation, yes, but not ending there, not by a long shot.  I need His Grace for EVERYTHING.  I cannot afford to set it aside, not for a moment.  Especially right now, when nothing in me wants to do what I know is healthy and yields life... when I am tempted to lean on my own understanding and do what "feels" right in the moment (ie. have a clandestine tete a tete with a pan of Ghirardelli brownies)...  ah yes, there is a way that seems right to a man (or, in this case, a chocolate crazed woman), but in the end it leads to death. 

The good I want to do, I cannot do (where have I heard this before?).  Who will rescue me from this body of death?  (boy, this is sounding really familiar). 

Thanks be to God, for His Grace, which is truly sufficient... and which I am leaning on more, and more.

I may screw up.  Maybe even today.  But I am leaning on His grace, nonethless.  I can't afford not to.