I love my body

"When there is no enemy within, the enemies outside cannot hurt you"

Well, this one was long overdue. I avoided writing about this topic for many reasons- it felt uncomfortable, I didn’t understand what was the root of feeling the way I did, I was running from it or I was hoping to write about it at some point in the future when I would look again “as I used to”. If you haven’t guessed it yet, I am talking about my relationship with my own body. I am 5 foot 3 inches and currently somewhere in the region of 10 stone and a half. I was skinny all my life but when I reached 25 and moved to another country something just happened and I went from 7 stone and a half to my current weight in a very short time. I managed to get skinny again between 2009 and 2012 and then again in 2015, but in rest I spent about 7 years either torturing myself with fad diets or exercising until I dropped for a while and then stopped every time my back pain would kick in. Then I would have to sit in bed and eat regular meals because of the painkillers I had to take so this became a bit of a vicious circle.. I would spend most of my journeys to work or any other places where I was surrounded by people, comparing my body with those of other women, feeling frustrated and ashamed and swearing that I will get slim again or die trying.

I am Romanian and one thing you will find on any tourist feedback form when one visits my country is “amazing food”. We love our food and we love to eat tasty foods. But after every session of making my country proud by enjoying my food, I would punish my body by starving it until I would shake, or refusing to get off a bike until I couldn’t walk anymore. In case you haven’t guessed it yet, I never do things half way.

Last Thursday, I was walking through Newstreet Train Station in Birmingham, and in my head I was trying to thank God for the beautiful sunny day and just share that moment with Him. I decided I have a serious problem when instead of enjoying that beautiful moment, I realised that for about 5 minutes I wasn’t praying nor was I enjoying anything. Instead I was constantly comparing my body shape with that of other women.

Then during the weekend, while I was in Bath, a really sweet friend asked me whilst I was busy taking pictures “Ema, don’t you want me to take a picture of you in front of the building.” I answered her, “No, thank you. I rather take pictures of buildings than of myself.”
The third incident is what completely knocked me over. I was scrolling through my Instagram feed and I noticed the posting of a person I am following. He uploaded a picture with his partner with the comment “If only this one smiled more often.” His partner was absolutely gorgeous and she had an amazing smile. Then my next thought hit me, “She is stunning and skinny, what’s there not to smile about?” Just like that! As if I knew anything about that girl’s life. As if being skinny and stunning is everything a person needs in order to smile. I had one of those moments when you grab yourself by the ear and drag yourself somewhere for a chat.

I’ve grown so much this year, I’ve learnt so much and achieved things I thought were impossible for me, I am happy and content and above all else I am healthy. What was my problem? So what if I am not size 6 or 8 anymore? Who cares? Who am I even listening to that I ended up believing that to be 37 and starve yourself in order to be a size 8 is something that should be aspired to? How did I allow someone out there to define my beautiful and most importantly why did I ever allow it? I wake up at 4,30 most mornings and do all the things I love, including exercising and eating a healthy breakfast. I have never in my memory felt more full of energy or content. So, is this something I am prepared to throw away, in order to starve myself and drag myself to bed every night without a dram of energy so that I can be a size 8 again? I am no longer prepared to accept their lies anymore, be it magazines or screens. Beautiful is not defined by skinny, or breasts size, or length of hair. A woman can have all of these attributes and be miserable and mean. That is not beautiful. That is sad.
My beautiful is being healthy and happy and content, walking about with a smile on my face, not because I fit in a perfect size 8 again, but because I get to experience so much beauty in my life that not smiling would be a crime.

Yesterday morning for the first time in my life at the “tender” age of 37, I related to my body for what it does rather than how it looks. And I loved it! It was 5,30 am and I was doing my stretches. I was never so grateful for my arms that can move perfectly, or my healthy legs than can walk and run and dance, my healthy lungs and heart, my open eyes that can see, my ears that can listen to all this beautiful music. My body is an amazing beautifully designed creation that humans still can’t fully explain in its entirety. And it is my home. I live there on the inside. And instead of taking care of my home and being grateful for it, I punished it for what my mind accepted and agreed with others on what beautiful looks like. No more!

Last time I dragged myself out of depression a few years ago, I started paying attention to the thoughts that were flying through my head in a day, so I came up with this statement: “My mind is a beautiful garden. I am very careful what I plant there. You don’t dump your rubbish in my beautiful garden.”But whilst taking care of my beautiful garden, I neglected to enjoy my beautiful home. I’m done with that. I will eat healthy and carry on walking and running and dancing, because every beautiful home deserves to be taken care of. If I am healthy and skinny, great. If I am healthy and a size 12, great. Those values mean nothing to me anymore. My health and energy levels and my contentment are my values now. I will define my own beautiful every time I will look in the mirror. I will love my body for the amazing ways in which it serves me and I will be grateful for every day that I get to be healthy and go places and do things. I am the only one who lives in this home and I am the only one who gets to decide what makes it beautiful.

"The thief comes only to steal, kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life and live it more abundantly." Jesus, John 10:10

P.S. This blog is dedicated to my sister-in-law, Lavinia Pop. Thank you for consistently living your life in a way that honours your health, your life and everything you are. You are a gift and an inspiration to me.

Midnight conversation in the shed

I had a dream last night. The dream kept moving around all sort of lifeless Christian conferences that I kept trying to make myself enjoy in the dream. But at some point, I was in the open air, in an audience sitting on a chair. On my left there were two men having a heated debate. From the context it appeared that one was a believer and the other was a curious one. The curious asked the believer, one of those questions like “Is God against gay people? I cannot remember the exact question. I asked God to remind me, but He didn’t, so I will assume it was not that important. Then, the believer gave an answer that I did not hear, but it made the curious livid. I thought he was going to hit the believer. Instead, the curious turned around and found refuge in some sort of a shed that was still to my left. I stood up from my chair and I went to him. What you will read below is my recollection of what I told him.

This morning I sat my alarm for 5,20. It is Saturday morning, but by 4,15 my mind was talking to this man whilst my body told me I was awake. I asked God, “You’re not going to let me go back to sleep, are You?” and I got out of bed and with a coffee in hand I wrote everything I remembered from my dream. I did it because I realised that it explains everything I believe right now and yet somehow it sums up all my journey with Him so far.
So here’s my speech to the curious one in the shed:

It is ok because I’ve asked the same questions as you and that is why I came after you in this shed. I read all that Bible and I believe it all. I believe it was God inspired and given to us as a guide. But the guide was given to all men who ever lived. And all men who ever lived had different cultures, different perceptions of what is good or bad. And yet that Bible can and is speaking to all of us. Yes, I know you think right now “It is clearly not speaking to me. Why do you think I hid in this shed so that I would not retaliate or punch that person?” But you see, it did speak to you, otherwise you wouldn’t feel the need to retaliate or punch that person in the first place.

Do you know why I am still here standing up for God and that Bible? Because after reading it, I grabbed on to some verses that spoke to me. And they spoke to me mostly because of circumstances of my life that were out of my control, places and feelings I ended up with. So I believe if they were out of my control, He took me there because He wanted to give me those verses. And those verses became my sustainers until I grabbed more and more of Him. Of Him, not what others told me He was like. But I haven’t carried on with me only those verses, I also carried the questions and the discomfort of not understanding, or of thinking that at times He contradicts Himself.

I wrote once that the greatest mistake a man can make is to try to explain God through his five own senses, because God cannot be explained by something limited by time and space. God can only be understood once He filters Himself though a human heart. Not just a human mind, but a human heart. Because once He does that, He alters you forever. So along the way, He altered me. He altered me until I was ok to live with what I do not understand. It was ok that my five senses could not explain to me everything, because I am an eternal being, they are not.

Something brought you here. Something still makes you stay in this shed and control your need to retaliate and punch in spite of the confusion and discomfort. Are you not curious to find out where this “something” plans to take you further? I was, and that is why I stuck around instead of going back to what I knew before and say that this was not for me.
One of those verses that carried me and still does, was “You will seek Me and you will find me if you seek Me with all your heart.” Jeremiah 29:13 
So at some point amidst my hot mess and dilemmas, I decided that since I will not go back and I will stick around, I will seek God with an open heart, with all my heart. Fearlessly, full of hope and courage. I thought to myself “If He clearly said that is how you find Him, then that is how I will seek for Him. Without trying to manipulate ideas to fit into my already created set of beliefs, without admonishing my heart and mind “how dare you?” every time it dared to ask questions such as the one you did, without fear of getting lost. With an open heart. I thought, if that Bible says that humans look at the outward appearance but God looks at the heart, then no matter where I end up in my “searching” if my heart is opened and all my motives are “I want to know You”, then He will not allow me to get lost. 

And do you know what it means for me to get lost? It means getting lost in a place, or an idea I no longer wish to abandon for the rest of my life. An idea I would use to make others feel like they are not good enough, that they are wrong and more lost than, in all fairness, I would be. I hoped and believed beyond all hope and belief that seeking with an open heart, will not make me get lost from Him and “miss it”. But the price to pay, is your willingness to lay down your ideas. Not the core of you, but your ideas. 

What is the difference? You cannot abandon the core of you. The core of you is what made you start seeking in the first place. The core of you brought you in this shed, rather than let you show that man the finger and turn your back. The core of you, is that part of you that you can’t quite put in words fully, that part of you that He already altered forever. That part of you that whispers to your mind “No, God is good and loving and just” every time something around you tells you otherwise. Because the more you open your heart, the more the core of you will come to understand that God is good and loving and just. Your ideas will come and go, though. Your ideas are like scraps of paper on which you write down stuff. In the end you end up keeping only those scraps of paper on which you wrote something important and you discard the rest. 

So I became more and more brave, because the more I saw this process repeat with ideas in my life, I came to see, not only to believe, that I can’t do this on my own. At some point, I have to trust Him to guide me. And the more you come to trust Him not to let you get lost, the more you will come to understand that everything He brings your way is for you to either learn from straight away, or for you to use later on in the journey. A song, a film, a passage from a book, something someone said, something you once dreamed, everything. But all these road signs come wrapped up in packages of ideas. And because your heart is open, you take in the whole package, some of the stuff is good, some of it not so much. But that is ok. Do not be afraid of the packages, because it is the same open heart that brought it all in, that God will use to help you discard the ideas that are not for you because they are not from Him. Just don’t be afraid to run with the package for a while, in the same way you started running at the beginning with the hot mess and the dilemmas. Trust with the same open heart, that in the end He will help you keep what is truth. Try to be brave and you will become braver the more you do it.

So I became brave, but do you know what else it did for me? The more I opened up my heart to take God in, He brought in with Him other people, and the more I opened my heart the more people He brought in, until my heart became big enough to contain everyone. Even those people that the Bible condemns- all of them. Yes, even gay people😊And once you love someone, you will find it harder and harder to point an accusing finger at them. When I got to this point, I fought against my ideas for the first time in a long time. Perhaps for the first time since the beginning. Eventually, I calmed down and I trusted that He will unwrap what He was trying to show me and “things will go back to normal”, but they never did. For the first time, I stepped outside myself and I looked at my fellow seekers. I understood that we are all travelling the same journey, is just that some of us are better at opening our hearts than others. And then He made me see another verse or better said two verses: “Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified  and do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.” (Joshua 1:9) and “Surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” (Matthew 28:20)

God is not limited by time and space, we are. And yet from his non-dimensional place, He stepped into our world and whispered to us “Be strong and courageous, do not be afraid and discouraged because there is no place where you will go that I will not be with you, and there is no amount of time that can pass that I will not be with you.” Wherever you go, even in the “wrong” or dark places, and always, even until there is no more time, even until the end of the age. And from really looking at my fellow seekers, I saw that the same “wherever” and “always” God was walking with them everywhere and all the time. With judgemental eyes and mind I asked myself “Why? Can He not see that they are pushing their ideas on others and using their ideas to make them feel like they’re not good enough? They are hurting others and putting them down, breaking people’s hearts and spirits. Why? Why is He walking with them?” Until I realised that I was one of those people God talks about when He says “People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.”

I was judging my fellow seekers whilst they were mid-way through unwrapping an idea, but He looked at their heart, always at their heart. He was their “wherever” and “always” God, just like He was mine. Yes, they were more vocal at times, but so was I in the past if I dared to look back. We all are. Because, at first, we fall in love with our ideas. We love them, because they are the love child of our seeking and our open heart. We love them as a parent does a child, and we will do anything to protect them, including making others feel less than our ideas or at the risk of hurting them. Until, we look at Him and we remember that our ideas are worthless without Him. Because our ideas come and go, but He is part of the core. 

If you dare to get out of this shed and go with Him “wherever” and “always”, at some point, you too will become one of those people you just wanted to punch today, but if you are prepared to let go of your ideas when He points to them, these will be just phases you will go through. It will never become the core of you. Do you know what will be the core of you? “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. Love your neighbour as yourself.” (Matthew 22:38-39) This will be your core and this will eventually become your compass. When faced with one of those people the Bible condemns and the dilemmas will rush towards your soul like rapid waters, you will slowly learn to grab on to your core rather than your ideas at that point in time. And “the condemned” will become to you your neighbour and the one you love. And then your actions will follow. You will place yourself between your loved neighbour and the accusing crowd of ideologists and tell them “Let the one without sin cast the first stone.”  

Are the ideologists wrong? Not according to passages from the Bible they are not and they will make sure they quote them at you. Is the Bible contradicting itself then? No, it never did and never will. But it presents to you an eternal, unchanging God and the ideas He offered humans throughout the ages in order to guide them through the hot mess. But He did something else, He left room for all of us to choose. He even encouraged us “choose life”, “choose mercy”, “choose justice”, “choose love”. And then He allowed us to read everything and make our choices. And that is how you end up with ideologists who get well and truly lost in their ideas to the point that they no longer see God or fellow humans. And that is how you also end up with open-hearted seekers who appear to the rest as unstable because they keep changing their ideas throughout their lives. But what only the One who looks at the heart can see, is that no matter how they might appear outwardly, the open-hearted seekers never ever change in their core. 

“You will seek Me and you will find Me if you seek Me with all your heart.” 

Is He hiding? Sometimes. Is He going away? Never. If He cannot be contained by anything, what am I actually seeking? Will this seeking ever end then? I don’t know. Probably not. But that’s the beauty of it. And in terms of what we are actually seeking from Him, that is a question each one of us has to find their own personal answer to. My own personal answer, up until now, is that I am seeking to understand Him more and more each time and with every new idea. I am seeking more and more to make room within myself for “all” of Him just as He made room within Himself for all of me. He made that room for me, when there was no room for me in Him. In my prior state, before Jesus, I had no room in God, because there’s nothing unclean in Him. And yet, there I was in all my hot mess and still He made room for all of me. So, you could say I am trying to “return the favour”.
Why did I come after you into this shed? I don’t know. Something made me stand up and come. Perhaps it is the same something that made you come here instead of punching that man, and the same something that makes you stay here and listen. 

I just wanted you to see another side of the One you are now contemplating turning your back on because “how could a loving God ever be like this?”. I just wanted you to see another side of the man you were about to punch, because “how could a God follower speak like that?” I just wanted you to see another part of the journey. You will meet many more seekers if you decide to stick around. Many will tell you far more than I did in this shed. Because you see, each one of them will show you another part of Him. Some parts you will fall in love with, others will leave you dumbfound. The point is, don’t judge God based on a specific point in time that you get to see, in the journey of a man with Him. God is not a point, God is everything and it will take you a walk of “wherever” and “always” to find Him. But do you know how my passage from Jeremiah 29 ends:

“I will let Myself be found by you.” It is not just your journey. He wants to be found and understood also. And as long as you keep an open heart and are willing to humbly let go of your ideas when necessary, you will find Him and He will be the greatest treasure a being can ever find “wherever” and “always”.

“He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly, and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” Micah 6:8 

Emanuela Robinson

P.S. This blog is dedicated to my brother, Cristian Pop, a fellow seeker with an open heart and determined soul. It is a joy watching what God is doing in your life and especially the way you relate to Him.