It’s a simple piece of equipment that the exercise physiologist gave my husband to strengthen his core and support his overly-aged back. Knowing my core was a bit on the flabby side, I decided to join him on his journey. Using the pressure monitor, we performed various core strengthening exercises that used muscles we didn’t know we had.
The instructions stated that we were not to move on to the next exercise until we had mastered doing the previous one with precise form. In only a few days we mastered exercise #1 and moved on to #2. Ken quickly progressed through exercises #3 and returned for more instruction, while I continued to feel like a newborn giraffe learning to walk.
When he arrived home, he began showing me the next exercises in my future, when suddenly I found myself feeling angry, hopeless, and wanting to give up.  “What the heck is going on?” I thought to myself. “There’s nothing wrong. Why am I feeling this way?” Within just a few short minutes, I felt ready to throw in the towel. “I’ll never get any better. I’m doomed to be fat and out-of-shape. Why even bother?” Luckily for me, I am well-rehearsed in A-B-C-D journaling so I grabbed my handy notebook and scriptures, and went out to the living room to process my emotions.
It didn’t take long to recognize some of the old thought distortions that had taken over my mind…old beliefs that I thought I had banished for good. As I recognized and challenged those old beliefs once again, I could see how I was comparing myself and my progress to someone else. I was expecting years of inactivity and poor choices to be reversed in a matter of days…or at least weeks!
Clearly seeing my distorted beliefs, I was now free to replace them once again with the truth: I am not competing with anyone else. Consistency compounds. Enjoy the journey! Already, I was feeling at peace once again.
Then I opened my scriptures. Would you be surprised if I told you that there on the page was a direct message from my Heavenly Father? Would you be even more surprised if I told you that He sent that message through His servant, Isaiah?
“Awake, awake, put on thy strength…Put on thy beautiful garments…for henceforth there shall no more come into thee the uncircumcised and the unclean. Shake thyself from the dust; arise, sit down…loose thyself from the bands of thy neck, O captive daughter of Zion.”
I was reminded once again that we are all daughters and sons of God. That makes us royalty. With the Lord, we are strong, even when we feel weak. Sometimes we find ourselves lying in the dust, chains about our neck, captive to the will of the flesh or the beliefs of the world.
Today is the perfect time to awake…to not allow unclean thoughts and beliefs to enter our minds any longer. It is time to stand up, shake off the dust, break the chains that have bound us, and take our place as rightful heirs to the blessings of God.
Because you’re human, I know that you have distorted beliefs about yourself. I know there are times when you believe you aren’t worth it…that you will never succeed…that all is hopeless. We all do. My hope for you is that you will learn how to recognize, challenge, and replace those thoughts. Awake! Don’t allow lies into your head any longer. Arise! Don’t wallow in the dust like captives to the beliefs of the world.  You are a child of God. Come. Arise, and take your proper place.

​Little Carson quickly piped up, “Not to talk!”
 
Sometimes, we can be surrounded by truth and still miss the message. I'm afraid that when it came to developing a healthy relationship with food, I spent years in the movie, but mistakenly thought the point was to learn to keep my mouth shut.
 
I had been on one diet or another for nearly 30 years, dieting my way UP 127 pounds, but still believed that happiness was just around the corner if I could just shut my mouth and stop using food like a drug. What I didn't realize is that I was missing the entire point of the movie.
 
Once I got a good coach, I began to understand that the point of this "movie" is not just to stop overeating or reach a certain size, but it is to recognize and change our weaknesses and false beliefs that caused the pain we have been numbing with food all of these years.
 
 
That was when I truly started to make progress. I began working to overcome my fears, my false beliefs, and replace them with truth. I began to recognize my worth, challenge my insecurities, and before long I was experiencing moments of peace that I had only dreamed about before.
 
Over time I developed greater consistency, and thus, greater results. I continue to work this day to overcome fears that arise, and I still have to challenge old beliefs when they pop up, but today, I look forward to it because I have developed greater faith in the process, faith in the Lord, and faith in myself.
 
The great thing is, once you learn to pay attention to the movie, you don't have to struggle not to talk through it anymore. You don't want to talk...you're too busy experiencing it...learning from it...being changed by it. Once you have been changed by it, you will want to invite others to the movie and help them be profoundly changed by it as well. After all, this one's a blockbuster!

In an effort to convince others and ourselves that we have it all together, we have forgotten that no one on the planet truly has it all together. Cakes fall, cards get messed up, and children fight. But in truth, the cake still tastes delicious, the birthday cards are thrown away, and children make up.
 
Life is about progress, not perfection. It’s about the messy everyday ways we deal with the craziness of our lives, not about the family photo. It’s about the fact that we never stop cooking, even if it's not the perfect dish. ​

Everyone in the family took turns gathering the eggs, from Ken to the youngest child. It was an easy job: Walk outside. Lift the hatch. Pick up eggs. Done.  So I never could quite understand why every time we went out of town, my mother would make a big point of announcing that she would watch the dog, but was NOT about to gather our eggs.
 
Finally, after some investigating, I learned that she had grown up with chickens back in the 40s, and gathering eggs had been more of a war game than a chore. Protective hens sat on their eggs and defended them from intruders, and she was the intruder. They pecked and scratched and made gathering eggs a terrifying experience for many a grown-up, let alone a little girl.
 
I wondered why our chickens didn’t fight to protect their eggs like my mother’s chickens had. Our chickens didn’t even stick around to keep their eggs warm most of the time. And if one did happen to decide it was time to play house, that was easily cured with some ice water on her backside.
 
When my husband asked a local farmer about this, we learned that as the egg farming industry has grown, the instinct to fight and protect their eggs has actually been bred out of chickens to make the egg gathering easier. As a chicken owner, I was grateful, though Mom still wouldn’t be caught dead near our chicken coop. But I had to wonder…how much is this like us?
 
Often, when we are young, we have lots of big dreams…loads of determination…a large store of "fight" in us. But through the years as our dreams are met with obstacles and our determination is faced with disappointment, we seem to have had the fight bred out of us. Our faith has been replaced with fear.
 
But we are not chickens. We can determine our own destiny. It is never too late to keep fighting for our dreams. Each day is a new day, and I have learned that fears can actually be transformed into the faith we need to keep moving toward our goals!
 
I have no desire to put the fight back in the chickens. But I do have a passion for putting the fight back in you. Let’s get back on the nest, look life square in the eyes, and dare the world to just try to take our dreams from us again. ​
​

Verse 35 teaches a principle that I have come to know for myself. The bruises on my forehead from years of wall-banging will attest to its truthfulness. It says,
 
“I know that God will give liberally to him that asketh. Yea, my God will give me if I ask not amiss…”
 
There are countless times that I have asked amiss, and then wondered why God wasn’t listening. Let me share with you just one example:
 
I received the title From Food to Faith in revelation over 20 years ago, in response to my prayers asking, “What book would you want me to write someday?” When this title came to me, I knew it was true that faith would be an important part of my recovery from overeating, but in all honesty, I wasn’t sure how.
 
I already believed in God, and in His Son, Jesus Christ. I loved them. I tried daily to follow them. But they didn’t seem to have the power to keep my hands off of a second serving of cheesecake. And I asked! Trust me, I really asked.
 
I prayed for self-control. I prayed for the right diet. I prayed for help in following the right diet. I even found myself at times thinking that if could just muster the courage of that stupid mustard seed, I could wake up in the morning completely, miraculously thin and healthy. You won’t be too surprised if I tell you that it didn’t happen, would you? In fact, none of it happened. Why? Duh. I was asking amiss.
 
There is nothing wrong with wanting to find or follow a healthy diet. There is nothing wrong with wanting to get back in my Levi 501s or wishing I could “walk and not be weary.” And there is certainly nothing wrong with wanting to overcome a destructive relationship with food. So why was God seeming to ignore my prayers?
 
I now know that I was not asking the right questions. I wanted God to get rid of the symptoms of the problems. But the true problem was much deeper, and more painful and scary than I was willing to deal with.
 
This was like going to a doctor with a foreign object in my body that is causing a raging infection, and begging the doctor to “pretty-please, treat my fever, but don’t even think about touching the problem, because it would be just too painful to deal with it.” And, like a wise doctor, the Lord could only sit back, and wait for me to be willing to allow Him to remove the source of the problem.
 
For years I continued to treat the fever. Sometimes I found the right combination of medications that would keep it at bay for a day, a week, or perhaps even a month. But in the end, the infection would increase, the fever returning with a vengeance.
 
Finally, I began to realize that weight was simply the fever of my problem. I began to realize that my dress-size was only a symptom, and it was time to gather all of my courage and allow the Lord...The Great Physician, to finally touch the source of my affliction.
 
It was painful…I’m not going to lie. But it was far less painful than the fever had ever been. When I began to let The Physician do His work, things began to turn around almost immediately. I began finding little moments of peace. My relationships began to change. My trust in myself, others, and God began to strengthen and I began feeling a strength and peace in my life that I hadn’t really known was possible before.
 
Sometimes, I still find myself neglecting the real source of my problems, thinking that perhaps I am done being healed. And when I do, my temperature can begin to rise. I am not completely healed. But I have come to rely on The Physician. And when He reminds me that it is time to work on the source of the problem, I strive to listen. And He answers, every single time. I have come to know that He will always answer, when I ask not amiss. ​

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”.

Sometimes the very things we want the most scare us. The bigger the idea, the scarier it seems to be...the more "impossible". It may even feel like we don't deserve to have, do or be it. 

In the John Maxwell Team, we call this the "Terror Barrier". You know the feeling...it comes up as soon as you begin to explore the possibilities of growth for your life. Shortly after you begin to take action towards your dreams, the fear kicks in. We pull up our proverbial feet, hoping to be able to interact with our dream without having to face the sharp teeth that we fear accompany the process of getting out of our comfort zone. 

It's important to remember that everyone experiences the Terror Barrier. For the first while, we run on motivation and excitement. But once our belief systems kick in we start thinking things like, "What was I thinking? I can't do this. I don't have time. I don't even deserve to be successful at this." The fear kicks in and we are now faced with a critical choice:

Will I turn around and go back to my comfort zone? 
or
Will I move through the fear and do it afraid? 

I am no exception. Becoming a coach has been exciting...and scary. finding peace with food has been exciting...and scary. Putting together From Food to Faith groups has been exciting...and scary. ALL processes that lead to actual growth include the element of fear, and the critical decision to move through the fear by doing it anyway...in other words, do it afraid.

When we face our fears of doing something but do it anyway, that is when we have the power to break through the Terror Barrier and actually attain a new level of success...an increase in our joy...another layer added to our comfort zone. 

I have learned enough now that I know I won't turn back, no matter how afraid I am. Why? Because the proverbial puppies that I was afraid of yesterday have become my best friends of today, moving me ever closer to the life of joy and significance I long for. So I can boldly declare, today I choose to do it afraid. ​Tomorrow I will choose to do it afraid. And I hope you will choose to do it afraid with me!