Hitting Linoleum Bottom

​It was a sunny day in December 2007. I had just finished walking my 85 9th-grade choir students back to the school after finishing our first concert at the local elementary. The kids were buzzing with excitement. What kid doesn’t like to miss a few hours of class to go show off for their old teachers? And this year, there was a little more buzz than usual…after all, Mrs. Ivory had actually been so fat that she had broken the piano bench and fallen to the gymnasium floor!
 

One-Minute Life Hack

I’m sure there were lots of laughs that day…but not from Mrs. Ivory. Mrs. Ivory put a smile on her face and laughed along with the several hundred students and teachers, hiding her bloodied leg, until she made it back to the solitary safety of her office…and cried.
 
I know, because I was Mrs. Ivory.
 
I loved teaching school. With 300 students a day, the energy was always high and I was always surrounded by a sea of good kids. I got to share with them my love of music. It was a blessing. But despite the blessing, the stress of a new job found me eating my way up another 50 pounds on top of the extra dress sizes I’d already accumulated when I went back to school in my 40s.
 
Excruciating pain had developed in my feet and made every step I took feel like I had microscopic pieces of glass in every cell. Doctors were baffled and exercise became nearly impossible. My war with food was in full-force, regardless of the 20 years I had spent dieting, and in this area of my life, I was physically and emotionally miserable.
 
My humiliating crash to that linoleum gymnasium floor was only more evidence to add to the emotional floor I’d been sitting on for years, and once again, I turned to the only thing I knew to numb the pain…food. Interestingly, in time I would discover that my problem was not the food. It was not the fat. It was the fear.
 
Fear had run my life for as long as I can remember: fear of being abandoned, fear of failure, fear of discovering that I will never, ever be good enough. So when I found myself sitting on the linoleum floor of an elementary school gym, surrounded by the deafening laughter of children and a few pitiful looks from teachers, my limiting beliefs about myself had only been strengthened.
 
The turning point for me came when I finally hired a mentor and coach who was able to help me see that fear was the root of my problems, and food only the symptom. As I became willing to do the work of challenging my false beliefs…of examining them, and replacing them with truth…as I began to trust God and His plan for my life, and the lives of those I love, then the healing began.
 
I began to find myself being picked up off of the proverbial linoleum floor, and seeing my life, and the world around me, from a whole new perspective…a perspective where I was not beneath the rest of the world, but where I was eye-to-eye and equal to. I began to find peace.
 
If you have been living on the linoleum floor of life, I invite you to take my hand and learn how to stand…how to brush yourself off…and live life up where you belong…equal with your brothers and sisters and cherished in the eyes of your Father. Learn to use that linoleum floor to help you walk your way towards peace.
 
Thankfully, I don’t crash to floors anymore…physically or emotionally. And in moments when the emotional chair seems to be a bit rocky, I know where to turn for support, comfort and clarity. I can finally say that I am grateful I finally hit “linoleum bottom”.

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