Red Balloons

Let me get this right out in the open.  I'm not a crier. 

I bet you're shocked.  Well, it's true!  I am not a crier.  I am not a weeper.  Yes, I cry.  Yes, sometimes I even weep.  I have even sobbed on occasion.  Some of you have been there for it, most of you will never see me even well up.

Well, that is unless you were in church this morning.

This morning was Pentacost Sunday, and in true United Methodist fashion, we celebrated with balloons.  No, actually it was really cool.  Balloons lined the staircases, and there were plenty for every child to take one home. 

So this all began, of course, with a balloon.

A red balloon to be specific.  Our Senior Pastor carried it up front with him this morning to make sure the kids saw the balloon, and to make sure that every child knew that they could take one home with them.  So he held the balloon up front during the morning announcements, handing it to our Associate after he made his point.  When our Associate got up to begin the call to worship, he handed it back to the Senior Pastor.  Therein began the problem, so the Senior Pastor got my attention, and he asked me to come get the balloon and pass it on to someone else.

Now, since it was Memorial Day weekend, there weren't a whole lot of children in the congregation, but as I scanned the room, my eyes fell on one little girl.  As I began to walk toward her, her eyes lit up in excitement and she reached for the balloon, so excited to be chosen.  So her parents tied the balloon to her wrist.

Great so far?  I'm not to the welling up yet.  Just wait...it's coming!

I was giving the children's sermon this morning, having switched with someone else.  I wasn't even on the schedule today, but I am so glad the other person wasn't able to do it.

When the children came up, here came the child with the red balloon.  Keep in mind that she is in preschool, and isn't more than four years old.

Our kids kneel at the rail for children's sermon, and today we of course talked about the Holy Spirit who came like a mighty rushing wind.  We talked about how we can't see the wind, but we can see what the wind does to those things around us.  How we can't see God with our eyes, but we can see the good God does all around us.  Of course, I had to turn on a fan with streamers attached to it to illustrate my point, because that's just what I do!  A great time was had by all. 

I ended with a prayer, and when I said "Let us Pray", the little girl with the red balloon scrunched her eyes up so tightly and folded her hands and was praying so, so hard.  After the "Amen", most of the children returned right to their seats.  Except the girl with the red balloon.  I put the microphone down and I turned to see her asking me to come closer.  I bent down and said, "What's up sweetie?" 

And do you know what that sweetie said?  In her four year and four hundred year old wisdom, she leaned in and whispered to me...

"God does everything good in our lives."

See, tears.  Even now, 10 hours later, I am still welling up.  What wisdom!  What observance!  "God does everything good in our lives." 

Think about all those good things in your life.  Family?  God.  Friends?  God.  Church?  God.  Pets?  God.

God does everything good in our lives.  Shame on me that it took a four year old to remind me.

Be sick...be loved.

T

Clumsy Thumbsy

(One thing to know before you read this is that I wrote this on Saturday while I was at a youth retreat.  I was running on 3 hours sleep and so it may not make a whole lot of sense.  But reading back through it now before I posted on here, I'm impressed at how much sense it actually makes!)

Sometimes I end up with some major texting fails.  I know I'm not alone in this regard because I have texted back and forth with a lot of people, and we have all done it.  Autocorrect is a gift...and a curse.  More than once I have told a kid that I would be picking them up in a black Sub...instead of a black SUV.  There are moments that make you laugh, and sometimes moments that make you want to send what you have written into the Ellen show.

I've gone through several of those in the last couple of days.  I will tell this one on myself, because it was my clumsy thumbsy that made it happen.

A friend of mine texted me and wondered if I wanted to come over for dinner on Thursday night.  I was teasing her, pretending I was saying that I wasn't sure I wanted to spend time with her or her family...which of course I very much did.  Finally I asked her, "Would you like me to come over for dinner? "  She said sure, so I said..."I'd love tit."  

Now, typically this is a "G" rated blog, but let me just say, I lost it.  And I know I wasn't the only one who did.  My friend and I were both laughing so hard we were crying, which is the absolute best kind of laughter.

So that's my Clumsy Thumbsy...or at least my latest one.  But I have other texting fails.

I moved recently, and when you move, you tend to go through things that you packed as you attempt to unpack.  For me, some of my stuff had not been unpacked since I packed it when I left Arkansas almost two years ago (still can't believe it has been that long).  Even some of that has been packed even longer.  And just a couple of weeks ago, I used one of my boxes to illustrate a point in a children's sermon.  So the other day, it was in my office and I went to get something out of it when I really started looking at it.  And I found something I have not thought about in a very long time.  I found my poetry book from when I was 13 years old.

A lot of you didn't know me back then.  When I was a kid, I wanted to be a writer.  I would write poetry a lot.  Now...it was bad poetry.  Not bad as in I couldn't share it with my grandmother, but bad as in pathetic.  And with that journal, I found another one that my friend had bought me in college.  I texted her to show her what I had found, and as I was reading through the pages of the journal (there weren't very many written on because I'm really bad at journaling), started thinking how pathetic I was in college.  So I tore those pages out.  I mentioned to my friend that I was pathetic in college, and at first she texted back that we all have our pathetic moments.  But then she got to thinking.

She wrote to me that pathetic wasn't really a good word.  We were who we were back then, and we learn from who we were.  We would not be the people we are today, if we hadn't been the people we were back then.  Does that make sense?

If a kid came to me today and told me their problems, and they happened to be the same problems that I had back in college, would I call them pathetic?  Or would I uphold them in love and grace, embrace them in their brokenness?  

Looking back, I still have a lot of the same issues that I did back then.  Would I call myself pathetic now?  Sometimes I want to.  Sometimes it's hard not to let the negative thoughts creep back in.  The feeling of insecurity.  The fear that I have disappointed or hurt my friends in some way.  The wanting so hard to please everyone and be all things to all people.  

Jesus doesn't think I'm pathetic.  He thinks I'm human.  He loves me in ways that I can't imagine.  He loves you in ways you can't imagine.  And God created us to be.  The creator of the world knows our name, created us in his image.  God don't make junk.  God don't make pathetic.  Clumsy Thumbsy on me for calling myself pathetic.  God don't make pathetic.  

For everyone out there today...Be sick...be loved.

T

PS.  I realized today that I have over 1300 views of this blog.  I know 1000 of them came from me, but for the 300 times the rest of you have viewed this blog, I want to say I appreciate it.  Please feel free to share it with your friends if it speaks to you in any way!

Be Sick...Be loved

I woke up yesterday feeling really good.

I was alive...always a good thing.  I had a good night's sleep and when I got on the scale in the morning, I was down another 1.2 pounds, which means I had made it past -60 pounds!  I was at -60.4.  I don't care what anyone says...that .4 is very important!  Even better, I knew I would be heading to not one, but two doctor's appointments in Charleston very shortly, and they are both doctors who have to look at my weight. 

Don't you hate weighing in at the doctor's office?  I mean...when you're weighing in the comfort of your own home, it doesn't matter what you wear.  I will admit, I weigh in with nothing on.  I mean...that watch of mine adds ounces...one point of that .4 pounds might have been because I took my watch off before I weighed in, right?

Well, then you go to the doctor's office and what do they make you do?  First thing...weigh in.  And you have to weigh in as is...I mean...they don't even have you take your shoes off!  Don't they know how much shoes weigh?!  My mother told me one time that when the doctor weighs you in, they only account a half a pound for your clothing.  A half of a pound?  My watch weighs more than a half of a pound!  So how happy was I that my first doctor's appointment just let me tell them what I weighed in at this morning...but they rounded up to the nearest full pound which means I lost my .4...small price to pay.  I wasn't so lucky at the second doctor.  It was after lunch and they made me stand up on the scale to weigh in...they wouldn't just let me tell them.  So of course, I was heavier because I had just eaten lunch...and I was fully clothed!

Well, enough about that.  Bottom line is that my doctor's appointments went fine.  My numbers for my kidneys were pretty good...they are functioning close to half, which is an improvement.  My thyroid levels were low which means my thyroid was slightly overactive and she needed to cut my medication back a dose...again.  I'm ok with that!  The more weight I lose, the less thyroid medication I need.  The protein level in my urine is getting much better.  For those of you who don't know about that, they do a spot urine test that tells the level of protein.  Lots of protein = bad.  The normal level for this is supposed to be between 0 and 17.  Last April (2011), mine was 790.  Waaayyyyyy bad.  In November, when I went back to the kidney doctor, it was 118.  Wayyyyyyy better, but still high.  Yesterday it was 42.  Lots better...still high...but lots better.  Amazing what happens when you take care of yourself!

Now comes the sick part.  In my profession, I get confessed to a lot.  Children, youth, adults...strangers...doesn't matter.  In fact, I get confessed to in the line at the grocery store...which is slightly awkward.  I think I have a sign on my forehead that says "attention all strangers, tell me your life story."  Which is fine.  Usually I don't mind.  But this time I know the person who confessed to me.  And it wasn't the confession that threw me off.  I learned a long time ago when you tell someone that they can tell you anything to be prepared for...well....anything.  I've heard some doozies over the years.  No...what got me about this confession was the way that it started. 

It started with, "Tracie, please don't hate me for this." 

Hate you?  I would never hate you!  I was slapped in the face one time by an incident at church, and I told myself right then I would never let a youth feel the way I felt at that moment.  Alone, lost, dropped.  I promised myself I would never let a kid feel that way.  I may have failed at that sometimes over the years, but I wasn't going to this time.

That makes me think of the gospel.  There is a great blogger named Jonathan Acuff.  He writes a blog called Stuffchristianslike.net.  It's an amazing blog and very insightful.  Mostly satire, but there are posts that he likes to call "Serious Wednesdays".  In one of those "Serious Wednesdays" posts, he sums up the gospel in four words.  Words that I have adopted lately and believe with all of my heart that he is correct in.  Those words are...Be sick...be loved.  Jesus didn't come for the well, for the whole.  He came for the sick.  He came for the broken.  We can be sick.  In that moment, the moment of our coming to Him in our sickness, in our brokenness, we are loved.  We don't have to be perfect to come to Him.  In fact, there's no way we can be perfect.  We are sick.  We are broken.  Yet the amazing thing about it, we are loved. 

That is what I told this person.  I don't care about your brokenness.  I don't care what you've done.  You can be sick around me.  We are all sick.  But you are loved.

I have learned some amazing lessons this week.  The wonders of God and His timing never cease to amaze me.  God knows what we need right when we need it, and for that, I will always be grateful.  I didn't know I was looking for something, but God showed me what I needed.  Our God is an Awesome God....indeed.

So for everyone out there today...

Be Sick...Be Loved.

T

Grandpa Knows Best

I love my grandfather very much, but as an 88 year old man with a brain bleed, he doesn't have much of a censor any more.  Sometimes, he just says things out loud that most people would keep to themselves.  I know this is part of his charm, and everyone says "he is so cute", but sometimes you just want to smack your forehead in frustration or in humiliation. 

He has loved that fact that I am losing weight and getting healthy.  It makes him very proud and happy, and even when he was in the hospital right after he fell, he could be screaming in pain in one breath and in the next ask me how much weight I have lost.  God bless the old man...

My mother has been a large part of my success because she has been on this journey with me.  I think we are both struggling with the fact that I now don't live with her, and therefore we have lost our "eating partners."  It's easier to eat correctly when you have someone watching exactly what you are eating, and you are eating the same things.  But anyways, my mother has lost a good deal of weight as well, and once, when my grandfather asked her how much she had lost, she told him and do you know what his reply was? 

"You can keep on going."

So...like I said, the censor doesn't always work in his head. 

Even though I live in Huntington now, I travel up to Winfield on the weekends to stay with him.  We were sitting in his living room on Easter Sunday night, and he looked at me and said, "Tracie, are you still losing weight or have you given up?"

Woah...wait a second there G-Pooh (We call him Grandpooh if you didn't know that).  First of all, we were watching a news story on cattle.  Second of all, we hadn't mentioned weight loss or anything all day! 

Now, a week later I am thinking about that.  When I first started my journey, I talked about nothing else.  I was probably a little annoying to my fellow workers and my fellow Americans and my fellow family members (who are all American as well...at least as far as I know).  But that was all I talked about.  My weight loss journey.  How much I had lost, how much I had exercised and how that was going.  But I haven't done that in a while.  I hadn't been talking about it.  I had also not been eating great around him.  He always has snack food at his house, and it's so hard to keep out of that.  Also, when I'm taking care of him, there is not a lot of cooking so there is a lot of fast food eating.  And I haven't been talking about it.  I haven't been steadfast in my diet or in my exercise.  And how do I feel?  Not as good as I did in October.  So have I given up?

NO.

I know things throw us off.  Grandpa's falling really threw me off of my eating correctly.  I haven't gotten back on the full-steam-ahead track.  And moving threw me off of my exercise.  And like my sister-in-law says..it's a slippery slope.  Once you get off track, it is hard to get back on.  I haven't gained weight, but I haven't lost either.  So what to change?

Everything.  I need to change everything.  I printed out my diet and hung it up on my fridge this morning.  I am making myself a store list so I can go and buy exactly what I need, how much of it I need and am writing down my meals this week and what I am going to be eating each and every day.  Breakfast, lunch and dinner.  And no more sleeping in through my exercise.  Get my lazy butt out of bed and do it! 

On the flip side of grandpa's insightful statement, on Saturday I went to my mother's hospital to help her and her boss tear down from their program.  I got out of my car and walked across the street to the hospital, and then I heard a voice behind me saying, "Tracie?"  When I turned around, my mother's boss was walking toward me and he said, "you know...I thought that might be you, but to be honest, I was expecting someone bigger.  You look wonderful!"  Now if that don't make you feel good, I don't know what does!

So thank you grandpa for your wisdom...and Richard for your compliment.  I have received a lot of compliments from you all for my Facebook profile photo, and I very much appreciate them! I have worked hard to get to this point and I need a swift kick in the butt every morning to continue to work harder to get to the next level!  As Nike has taught us...JUST DO IT!

T

Starting over...again...and again...and again...

So, yes, I know that it has been over a month since my last blog post.  So much has happened in that month, but it shouldn't have taken me that long to update.  But it did.  Why?  Because I'm lazy. 

It's not that I'm overly lazy.  I do a lot of stuff, but I just wasn't feeling the blog writing.  Does that make me a bad person?  Maybe.  I had time to write, but just didn't feel up to it.

It's been a roller coaster of a month.  In this month I have gained weight, lost weight, moved to a new apartment, seen a 9 month old child buried, got the information that our pastor would be leaving and heard who the new pastor would be.  Crazy!  Why does everything have to happen all at once?  Can't God just give us one big thing a month instead of everything altogether?  We need to start a petition...

I don't think I have updated on here since I began my Power 90 journey.  For those of you who don't know what that is, it's not P90X.  (Bet you never saw that coming!)  It's the beginners version of P90X, which means it is an intense full body workout program.  You lift weights three days a week, and you do cardio three days a week.  Let me tell you...for this fat chick who is waaaayyyyyyy out of shape, it is intense!  But the funny thing is, I love it.  It really does give me more energy, helps improve my mood and is toning up my body.

Several weeks ago, I went to Cincinnati to visit my brother and his family.  He has 18 month old twins and they are full of energy.  The last time I had seen my brother was the middle of January, and he was amazed at the amount of energy I have now.  Several people I know have now ordered the program, and from what I can tell, they are enjoying it as much as I am.  Of course, there are parts that I hate...like Power Yoga.  I thought yoga was supposed to be relaxing...not so much.  And I don't like runners luges either.  I don't know if I'm not coordinated enough, but me doing runners lunges is like a hippo doing the cha-cha.  Not pretty.  I feel sorry for the floor beneath my feet sometimes!

But the difference I have noticed has been worth it.  I have a neck now!  You can actually see the muscles in my neck!  And I have muscles!  My mother tells me that when I'm exercising, the backs of my legs are really getting toned.  So I'm halfway through..

Actually, last week I was over halfway through.  But stress...good old stress.  The age old excuse.  I was stressed out with the move and everything, and I did not pay attention to what I ate.  Didn't even try.  Living on my own again seemed to be an excuse to eat whatever I wanted.  No one was watching!  And I only exercised two days last week.  What was up with that???

We all go through bumps in the road.  I had my bump, and I knew I needed to do something about it.  So Sunday night I decided I needed a kick in the pants.  I decided to do a fast...not a full fast because I don't disillusion myself to thinking I can handle that, but a fruit and fruit/veggie juice fast.  And this fast is to last for 48 hours.  I bought bananas, V8 and orange juice.  Yesterday wasn't too bad.  When I was hungry, I would eat fruit or drink juice, and did really well.  Felt energized (sugar rush!) and felt "cleaned out".  Today, I even woke up not hungry.  For lunch today I had a salad that was all veggies and fruit, and only a little bit of fat free dressing.  I actually feel really good.  I did it partly to jump start my diet, partly to remind myself that I do have will power. 

That's the thing I have the hardest time with...willpower.  It's almost like I can only focus on one thing at a time.  If my exercising is doing really well, my eating is not.  If my eating is doing really well, then my exercise is not.  I need to get in sync!  (Not NSync because they're Bye, bye, bye...oh yeah...I went there.) 

So all you fellows out there who struggle with the same things I do, let's get in sync!  I see so many of you share your triumphs and I am so proud of you.  I hope that we can share our struggles as well as our triumphs, because they're real too.

Oh...and I'm back on the exercise, and I even upped the intensity to level 3/4.  I kept up pretty well these last two days, so let's keep going more and more!  Bring it!

Grace and Peace,

T

The Photos!

So here we go.  Are you ready for this?  I didn't think so.  I wasn't ready for this.

One year ago,on Super Bowl Sunday I took a picture in my Steelers get-up.  I always hated that picture.  I mean, really, truly hated that picture.  I felt like I was the Stay-puff marshmallow man (anyone get the Ghostbuster's reference?).  Or the Phillsbury dough-boy.  If you poked my stomach, I would let out a giggle or something. 

Either way, I hated that picture.  Oh yeah, here it is right now...

Don't I look terrible?  I look like I feel awful, and frankly, looking back on it I did feel awful.  I felt so tired all the time and slow.  Yes, I am who I am and I have learned to be comfortable with who I am now, but I was not comfortable here.  Not at all. 

Don't scroll down just yet!  I have some more I want to say!

After my meeting with my doctor in April, it still took me a couple of weeks to really get to it.  Once I did though, things began to happen.  And they can happen for you too!  In October, I went back to the kidney doctor.  I had lost about 50 pounds by then.  He told me that he had never seen a patient do a turn around like I did.  That he had never had anyone who took what he said to heart, and improved their situation so much.  My blood work was so much better.  He wants to see me again in May, but he told me that if I keep up this pace, that he would only have to see me once every couple of years.  Isn't that amazing???

So anyways, almost 60 pounds later, and this is me today.

 
Look at it!  I have a neck!  And a chin!  And a long way to go.

I'm not stopping...but this photo is inspiration.  It helps me see where I came from, and motivates me to keep going.  Next year at the Super Bowl I will do a three photo blog! 

I wish you all the best of luck on your journey, wherever that may lead!

T

My time, His time

So, it's been about a week since I have posted on this blog, because frankly...I didn't have time.

Time?  What?  Time?  How ironic that I just used that word because that's exactly what I want to talk about today!  Ha!  Funny how that works, isn't it?

Actually, I want to talk more about timing.  Sometimes, our timing is bad.  A friend of mine sent me a Facebook message yesterday reminding me of something.  You're going to get a brief (hopefully) history lesson from me today.  I told you once that I would tell you about my history with my weight, and today is that day. 

So, you have some popcorn?  Some fruit?  Because sit back, I am going to take you on a journey....Once upon a time...31 one years ago I was born...

So I was a very active child.  I was always running here, there and everywhere.  I played soccer on an all boys soccer team (I didn't want to play with those sissy girls), and was pretty good at it too.  I would climb trees like a monkey, ride my bike, roller skate, play football...you get the picture.  To burn off extra energy, my mother would make me go outside and run around these three cherry trees that we had planted in the back yard.

Gradually, things began to change about the time I was 8 years old.  Despite the fact that I was still active, I had begun to put on a few pounds and was a little more lethargic than I used to be.  They also discovered blood pressure in me around that time, which the doctors at first thought was due to my allergy medication.  Now, I was a child and don't remember much of the specifics.  But the next few years I continued to gain weight, was much less active, was tired all the time and couldn't walk up a flight of stairs without breathing hard.  My blood pressure was still high and my mother, the nurse, had me at different doctors and they put me through a battery of tests at the hospital.  My mother was convinced I had a thyroid problem, but couldn't get any of the doctors to listen to her.  Because my blood pressure was so high that put stress on my kidneys and they began to fail.  Finally, when I was 12 years old, my mother got fed up with the doctors at the hospital and dropped my chart off at my grandmother's endocrinologist.  (Thyroid doctor)  Before she had even gotten home (a 15 minute drive), there was a message on the answering machine telling my mother to bring me in the next day, and to get this blood test done.  As it turned out, I had a disease called Hashimoto's Thyroiditis.  Basically, that is when your body thinks your thyroid is a disease and attacks it and destroys it.  Do you know you need your thyroid to live?  It messes everything up!  I was totally messed up.  So I was put on a pill (a synthetic thyroid), and I have to take that every day for the rest of my life.

Fast forward several years.  Because of the stress my kidney's went through, when I was 19 I had a kidney biopsy and it revealed I had 33% irreversible damage to my kidneys.  

Fast forward several more years.  I'm in Arkadelphia Arkansas, and a friend and I begin a weight loss journey.  I lose 50 pounds.  However, because I was not watching my thyroid, that went all out of whack and I gained it all back because of depression, insomnia, etc.  (See, thyroid really has a hand in everything!)

So after that I began a season of stop and start dieting.  We all know about this.  We all have done this at one time or another.  We are going good on a diet for a few weeks, or a month, and then we get stressed out, etc.  That brings me to time.

My church in Arkadelphia began a program called "First Place".  It is a combination weight loss/bible study.  I wanted to do it.  I really did.  I went to the first one we did, even lost a few pounds (13 in one week one time, but that was because I had meningitis and couldn't eat anything), but an illness pulled me out of it.  I wasn't ready.  I thought I was...but I was working on my time. 

This past year has been quite a journey for me.  In February of 2011, I had some blood work done that was concerning.  It showed that my kidneys were only functioning at 44%.  While my thyroid was doing well and no adjustments in medication were needed, my kidneys were failing.  So off to the kidney doctor I went in April.  He sat me down and told me that I needed to loose 100 pounds.  That I was in for a world of hurting, health wise and that I was too young to be going down this path.  Basically, I would die young if I didn't make this change.  He told me that I needed to go on a low protein diet that was designed to help me lose weight and even suggested I talk to a clinic about weight loss surgery.  Yikes!  That was drastic! 

However, I did take his suggestion to heart.  On May 3, 2011 I began my journey.  I lost 30 pounds just by changing the way I ate.  Hmmmm...why didn't that work before?  Oh, that's right!  God's time.  Then I began to exercise. 

Today, I am down 58 pounds.  I am almost to 60.  I can't wait to be at -60.  The last three months have been a big struggle with my weight.  While I haven't gained much back (only 5 pounds and most of those are gone already), I have had to make some adjustments.  More stress has come into my life, less time to relax for me and less time to exercise.  However, this is not the end.

After a LOT of research, I began to do a program called Power 90.  If you have heard of P90X...well...it's not that.  It's a beginners version of it.  And I love it!  I have done 11 days now and have already lost about 6 inches all over my body.  I've gained .2 pounds but I know that is muscle and that will happen.  Muscle does in fact weigh more than fat!  Who knew?  And no, I am not getting paid to advertise this product.  I just love it so much and feel the effects from it.  The first few days I was horribly sore, but now it's just a pleasant tiredness that reminds me I have exercised, and exercised well.  And soon, the fat will be melting off.  AFter the muscle building comes the fat loss. 

Guys, I can't force you to do what I've done.  Some of you don't need that.  Some of you feel you need to but you're not ready.  There will come a moment where God will put someone in your path, and that person or what they say will become your motivation.  That's what happened for me.  I wasn't ready.  Not until God put that person in my life that told me that I was going to die young if I didn't turn this around.

Oh, by the way, my last blood work was AWESOME!  My cholesterol dropped over 100 points, my kidney function has improved 8% and I am really on the upswing!  See...God's timing. 

I want to thank you for all the support I have gotten from everyone over these last 10 months of this journey.  You have made me believe that I can do this, and have made me feel good from your compliments.  I don't know what I would have done without you.

In His Time,

T

PS.  Coming Monday!  (or Tuesday)  A picture of me at the Super Bowl last year and a picture of me at the Super Bowl this year!  (no...not the actual super bowl...just a party).  I will be wearing the same shirt and hopefully the difference will amaze you! 

Oh, and feel free to ask me any questions you have.  I'm very open about my medical issues and very comfortable talking about weight loss.