On Friday I trashed the scale. I called my husband, Rich, at school and asked him if he cared if I got rid of our scale. He didn’t care. He wasn’t the one who religiously weighed himself multiple times a day.
I thought of all sorts of dramatic ways I could dispose of it. I could drive sobbing all the way to my therapist’s office (one hour each direction), interrupt a session and deliver my scale creating a moment of emotional chaos and stealing attention for myself. I could drive to her office and leave it on the steps with a note – as though it was a baby left somewhere to be discovered and cared for by someone else.
In the end, I settled on a much more simple plan. I merely put it in the trunk along with all the cardboard and plastic that needed to be recycled, and drove to the convenience center.
The attendant came out to help, but I grabbed the scale because something inside of me knew I needed to be the one to trash it. I asked him where it should go and he nodded toward the industrial size trash compactor. While he took care of the cardboard and plastic for me, I tossed it right in there. It landed on a big, black bag full of trash. After one last look, I turned and left. That’s it. No drama.
The most important thing, the best thing about that event was that God was watching. God saw what I did and I knew right away he was pleased. I knew before I even got back to Highway 185; and I saw God! For the first time in a long time, I saw Him. That glimpse of God satisfied my soul, even without the drama.
I realized I had been worshiping the wrong thing because it felt to me like I had gotten rid of a household god. I had been trusting my scale instead of my God. How foolish. The scale is not alive like my God is. The scale cannot refresh me like my God does. The scale cannot keep me safe or change my heart. Only my God can do that. He may not always choose to keep me safe in the way I want, but he has promised to watch out for me. And He did.
A short while before Rich and I lost our baby and I sank deep into a sea of trauma. I was standing on the steps near Rich’s office at school and God spoke to me. “Don’t worry. No matter what happens, I will be there.”
The day our baby died, it didn’t feel like at all and in the following days and weeks of grief I couldn’t see God because I took that big, old scale and put it right smack in the way. But all that time, he was waiting for me to toss it in the trash compactor and trust in him instead of my scale. In Deuteronomy 12, God tells the Israelites to tear down the high places. He doesn’t say it just once, but several times, and He uses big, serious words like, “obliterate”. Well, that compactor pretty much obliterated my scale.
So now what?
I miss the scale, I admit, but that’s okay. Now every time I wish I could know how much I weigh, I remember, “Oh yeah, here is where I trust God – like with my body.”
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