Hey all.  So for those of you who don’t know, this is my sister Marilyn.  I’ve been nearly beside myself with excitement to share her story here, because, YOU GUYS,  IT IS SO FLIPPING AMAZING AND I GET TEARY EVERY TIME I THINK ABOUT IT.  And yes, it really is all caps worthy.

So here’s the scoop and what might not be apparent when you see these photos if you haven’t known Marilyn in the past.  Marilyn has struggled with food addiction for two decades.  Ya’ll.  We’ve all got our battles, our addictions, our stuff that causes us pain that we just can’t muscle our way through.  It is HARD STUFF.  That’s why when Jesus comes and sets us free, it is beautiful and powerful to speak of how He has done His thing in our lives.

Below is Marilyn’s story in her own words.  She works for a Bible translation organization called Seed Company in Dallas, Texas.  In March, she led morning prayer for the staff.  This is the notes from what she shared.  READ ON. :))

Marilyn’s Story

Over the last year, as you may have noticed, I’ve undergone a little bit of a transformation.  A pretty visible one if you’ve known me for a couple of years.  It has been a LONG time coming. Like long.  Think twenty years.  It has literally been a twenty year conversation I’ve been having with the Lord.  So in three days (March 10) it will be the one year anniversary of walking into my first WW workshop (also known as Weight Watchers meeting – rebrand :).  I had no idea what the Lord had in store for me in the coming months.

I want to back up just a little bit to a couple of weeks before March 10th, 2018.  There was a session at staff retreat that plays a pretty significant role in this part of my story. On the night that Bruce Wilkinson shared, I was deeply impacted by several things he said.  For those of you who weren’t there or have slept since then, these are some of the things I was convicted by.

Unbelief.  Straight-up unbelief.  I’ve known Jesus for a long time, but unbelief had a significant hold in my life.  How that played out in my life was in this fear that colored many of my choices.  I wouldn’t put a stake in the ground, set my heart on a goal without knowing the how to get there.  So I froze for many years, afraid to move in any direction.  No vision, no staking a claim, passively and fearfully making agreements that my life will always be small. Aimless wandering through life requires no faith.  Committing to a goal or vision (God’s vision) without knowing the how (the strategy) THAT requires FAITH.

Some of the challenges that were laid before us that evening really came right up against and exposed those areas of unbelief in me:

• What does GOD want done? Not what can Marilyn do in her own power and mind and be assured of success.  God will let you know when you’ve got His goal.  He will give you peace.
• Get out of the boat.  Take a step on that water.
• You never know HOW to do what is beyond your borders.  Trust the Lord to bring the strategies.  Ask Him to enlarge your territory.
• God is looking for people who don’t want to CONTROL it.  (Whatever ‘it’ is.)
• Abandon the old strategy. This one was really scary for me.  What if I let go of the old strategy that I have in my hand and He doesn’t give me a new one?  Sure, it may have been a lousy one; but at least it was something.  Might not take that territory, but at least it was something.
• The supernatural is ALWAYS in the land of belief.
• Giants are a gift. God’s tired of old glory. He wants to show Himself in new ways.

So that evening there was an altar call of sorts, to which I responded.  I knew that I needed to confess the sin of unbelief and ask Jesus to extract that root from my heart.  A week or so later, I took my first very tentative step into new territory.  Let’s be honest…it wasn’t a confident “this is going to be AMAZING, bold, God’s-gonna-come-through moment.”  No, no.  It was the last day of a really good sign-up sale that WW was running.  Yes, I literally waited until the last day.  But, I signed up.

Then, nine days later, I walked into my first workshop.  Between 10-14 days after I had signed up, I was in morning prayer and Shawn was sharing something. To be honest, I don’t really remember anything he shared other than a couple verses. In that moment, I KNEW, beyond the shadow of doubt, that the Holy Spirit was speaking directly to me.

2 Corinthians 6:1-2

As God’s co-workers we urge you not to receive God’s grace in vain. ² For he says,

“In the time of my favor I heard you,
    and in the day of salvation I helped you.”^[a]

I tell you, now is the time of God’s favor, now is the day of salvation.

I can’t prove this to you but I believe in that moment, the Lord performed a miracle in me. When that last sentence was read, I knew with utter certainty that the Holy Spirit was saying NOW is the time of my FAVOR and I knew he was speaking about weight loss. It changed me in ways that are now evident, but I was transformed inside a long time ago in March 2018.  So on March 15, 2018 I asked the Lord to help me lose 100 pounds by December 31, 2018.  Mind you, I have 20 years at this point of trying and failing to lose weight.  I shared that with a couple of close friends and family and then watched the miracle unfold.  Seriously, that’s what it felt like.  I was just walking a path that Jesus had cleared for me.  The song called Catch the Wind sung by Melissa Helser also captures what it has felt like to walk in His favor in this area of my life the past months.

Part of this story is also an August-November story of discovering that I had a 7 cm nodule on my thyroid that was causing significant issues with anxiety and stress, high heart rate, no energy.  For a bit, it stole my joy, but the Lord restored it to me (even in the midst of an incredibly intense and busy season at work).  One of my favorite moments was when my endocrinologist looked at me and asked how I was feeling.  My sister Lori was with me at the time.  I said, “I’m feeling great! Doing well!” and kinda looked at Lori for affirmation that I wasn’t completely out of touch with all my feels.  I asked the doctor, “How should I be feeling?”  Based upon my bloodwork, I should have been gaining weight, depressed, these symptoms just completely opposite of my experience.  So that whole journey is another really cool story, but what I want to leave you with is this.  I’ve known Jesus for a long time.  2018 is not the first time He has shown up in my life.     My addictions have been slowly dealt with over the last years of my walk with Him.  Through my inability to break free of my food addiction on my own, I’ve learned the most about who I am in Him, apart from what I do.  This year has once again shown me, in a way that I knew in my head, but had not experienced in quite the same way – “Apart from Me, you can do nothing.” And that’s a mercy, because these foundations that we place our hopes on: job title, money, security, accomplishments, accolades, whatever success looks like to you – those will be as much of a prison as my addiction to food was if they are done apart from Him. They’ll chain you to a performance wheel that can crush you because it will never be enough.  What we do and accomplish is so important, but my prayer is that it is always from a place of being rooted and grounded in our identity in Christ.

*Deborah speaking again now.  BTW, she didn’t mention it in her speech, but she reached her goal of losing 100 pounds ahead of schedule – sometime in November of 2018.  As a fun sidenote, these photos were taken January 1, 2019.  At that point she’d lost 116 pounds, and has since lost an additional 11 pounds.  So of course her eager-beaver photog sis is insisting on another mini sesh next time we see each other.  She has EVEN more great stories to share of how the Lord has continued to bless her journey, but maybe we’ll save those stories for the next session. 😉