My friend Pam works for Back the Bible. She’s a researcher, and her primary task is to find out the most common obstacles to spiritual growth and then to offer a strategy for overcoming those obstacles. One morning, Pam and I sat across from one another at a table in the local coffee shop, and I asked Pam, “So, what did you find out? What are the obstacles?”
Obstacles To Spiritual Growth: Fear And Worry
“Well,” Pam said. “For everyone — men and women — the top two obstacles are the same: fear and worry.”
Check, and check, I thought to myself. I’ve been trying to get out from under fear for a good part of my life. And, when someone doesn’t arrive where I think they’re supposed to be, when I think they’re supposed to be there, I automatically go to the, they-must-be-lying-in-a-ditch scenario. Worry is my go-to, when left to my own devices.
Obstacles To Spiritual Growth: Criticism of Others and Food
“But for women,” Pam continued, “the number three and number four obstacles to spiritual growth are criticism of others,” I nodded my head, “and food.”
I struggled to figure out how food could possibly be an obstacle to spiritual growth. But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense, especially when hanging onto the coattails of fear, worry, and criticism of others. Sit with it yourself, for just a minute or two, and let me know whether or not it makes sense to you, too.
We, women, are always counting our calories or complaining about the size of our jeans or categorizing in negative terms the shapes our bodies embrace. We are never satisfied, and we are experts in the conversations about calories in and calories out. Food becomes our nemesis. We limit our enjoyment of it. We section it off into “good” and “bad” based on whether or not we think it will settle on our hips. And then we wonder how she can eat a cupcake after dinner every night without ever seeming to gain an ounce. We label her metabolism good, and our own not so good. We measure ourselves against her and her. We watch our sisters as they pass us by, and we are tempted — oh, so tempted — to play a game in our heads that sounds like, “Who Wore it Better?” We rank our sisters against one another, and against ourselves, hoping we end up someplace near the top of the list. We worry when the arbitrary numbers we’ve assigned to breast and waist and hip size find us further from the top of the list then we would like. Sisters, the truth, of course, is that we fear we won’t be loved for who we are in this moment, right now.
We are fearful that our neighbors find us awkward or that the woman in line at the grocery store has taken note of our hips and found us wanting. We keep the lights off with our partners because we fear their rejection if they actually could see us in the light.
But Light is actually the cure for what ails us, isn’t it?
