SED- Bulimia

I am spiritually bulimic. I’ve known it for sometime now and this post is going to be tough to get through because everything I write I know I’m writing about myself. When most people think of vomit they think of this putrid, half-digested, burning pile of stomach acid. You’d be hard pressed to find someone who gets really excited about vomiting. Growing up I seldom vomited. I often lied about it to get out of school but from the age of 3 to the age of 22 I was completely vomit free.

So at the age of 22 when I was sitting in my Human Rights and International Politics class at Hope and I had this weird feeling like my stomach hurt and the only way to fix it was to sneeze I thought to myself is this what vomiting feels like? I ran out of the classroom confused like a teenager realizing they need to shave for the first time. I saw a trashcan and my instincts kicked in. As I hunched over it and began the unsavory process my first thought was this is awesome! It felt good. There was this stuff in my stomach that just wouldn’t digest and when it finally got out my body was very happy. Sorry for all the details but I promise you it’s all for a purpose.

this sign is also for a purpose.
haha.

See, typically vomiting is reserved only for that stuff that your body knows it can’t digest and process or else it may kill you, so your body takes care of it another way. When it comes to bulimia you force your body to purge things that you have decided are not worthy of digestion. In many ways it is similar to anorexia because it makes food into an enemy. An act that was once reserved only for the most vile food substances is now committed on nutritious things that your body actually needs.

The other aspect of bulimia happens right before the purge. Bulimia is also often referred to as binging and purging. When you’ve been starving yourself your body starts to make you really hungry and then when your will power breaks you take in all of this food until you feel sick and guilty, and so you purge.

this is the censored version of the picture I wanted to use.

Often times I feel like I’m starving for spirituality. I look for it anywhere I can and I see in all sorts of places. When I indulge in all of this and take in as much Christ as my body truly needs I realize that I don’t really want to digest it. I get about halfway through thinking about it and breaking it apart and then realize that if I keep going it’s going to go straight to my belly and I’ll look even more unsavory to the standards that the world has set. If I truly allow myself to digest the spiritual food Christ gives me then there will be consequences on my life. I will not look the same.

So after I take in that big meal of working at a church and spending time reading Christian blogs and talking Christian talk with my friends and I finally go home and settle in I realize that if I practice what I just learned that my life would have to be drastically different from what it is and that’s not going to be a good thing in the eyes of all my friends.

So I vomit it up.

For a while I thought that was my profession. I was meant to take in all of this stuff, chew it a bit and spit it out so other people could digest it easier. It was baby bird food. Now if you follow this metaphor of digestion to its logical end (pun intended) you may find yourself somewhere unsavory, but what I mean to say is that when we digest the spiritual food we take in we get the nourishment from it. We go through a process of struggling with it and separating the bad from the good rather than purging all of it out on others.

I can’t count how many times I’ve given a message to the students that was essentially me repeating something I heard from a blog or another pastor. I remember volunteering at a summer camp and hearing a speaker repeat a story from a Rob Bell book and say that it happened to him. Later I asked him if he liked Velvet Elvis and he said “it was alright, I didn’t get much from it though” and I couldn’t help but think “you seem to have gotten a whole sermon out of it” and I know I do that, but I do it because I don’t want to really process what I’m taking in.

Go to Netflix and watch any food documentary and you’ll see that the things you eat have a huge impact on your life. Not just the way you look but the way you act and your overall health. 

see how ominous this is?!

So, think about how much more our lives are affected by the things we take in spiritually and yet it seems that there aren’t that many people whose lives are greatly changed. You look out your window and you can see people who clearly have good diets and people who clearly don’t but you can’t see what is happening spiritually.

I think it’s because most of us have a spiritual eating disorder of some sort.