Understanding God's Hand in Our Lives

April 2, 2009

The second step of Overeaters Anonymous is:
“Come to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.”

It starts with the question: “Have we acted in an extremely irrational and self-destructive manner when eating?” Some examples of this are: driven for miles in the dead of night for something we crave -- eaten food that is frozen, burnt, stale, or even dangerously spoiled – eaten food off other peoples plates, off the floor, off the ground – dug food out of the garbage and eaten it – stolen food from your friends or family. Have we eaten beyond the point of being full, beyond the point of being sick of eating?

Does this mean I have to give up the 10 second rule when we drop food on the floor?

Have we become obsessed with diets – spending lots of money trying everything from diets to drugs to hypnosis to stomach stapling? Some of the things that we try can be damaging to our health: the pills we take – laxatives – vomiting and the list goes on. “They work for awhile, but we inevitably lose control and over eat again, putting back on the weight we had worked so hard to lose.”

Overeaters Anonymous is a spiritual program not a religious program.

This statement makes me ponder: “Sometimes we religious ones (the others are agnostic or atheist) have trouble because we believed in God’s existence, but we do not really believe God could and would deal with our compulsive eating. Perhaps we don’t believe that our compulsive eating is a spiritual problem, or we feel that God is concerned only with more important matters and expects us to control such a simple thing as our eating. We failed to understand that God loves us in our totality and is willing and able to help us in everything we do, that God will help us with every decision, even food choices and amounts.”

Sunday, a young woman told us how she had lost an important check and prayed that she would find it. The Lord answered her pray. She said she felt silly and embarrassed talking about her simple request when there were many more important requests for help. But her prayer was answered.

We are taught in the scriptures to pray morning and night. We are taught to pray over our crops and everything in our lives. It is important we learn to pray for the small and simple things like lost key or lost checks.

“Most of us have asked God to help us control our weight and this prayer hadn’t worked. . . our pleas for helped seemed to fall on deaf ears. What we were really asking God to do was remove our fat while allowing us to go on eating whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted.

How do we ask for God’s help? We need to put in simple words what we need help with. Help me feel full so I will not want to eat that chocolate. Help me have the strength to not eat the junk food. Help me remember what I have learned about healthy eating. Help me not eat compulsive while I am dealing with this problem that is causing me stress.

These are some of the questions that I have been asking myself:
How does God fit into my life?
Do I understand how God’s hand works in my life?
Do I have faith? Can I act on that faith?
Do you like yourself? Do you love yourself?

The willingness to act on faith is the key to step two – new faith in ourselves, in others, and in the power of love.

When we begin to develop a new relationship with God, when we have the faith that he will help us, then we are ready to move ahead with our program of recovery.