I didn't wake up one morning planning to be anorexic.
I woke up knowing I couldn't pretend anymore.
I was the good girl in the mushroom haircut and the corduroy pants. The 9-year-old who was starving for attention. I was the pastor's kid whom no one saw—there in the front pew. "The Serenity Prayer" hung on our walls. We said grace at every meal, went to church every Sunday, flossed and said "please" and "thank you."
I wasn't allowed to play with Barbie dolls or look at fashion magazines, and was given a purity ring and Christian books to read.
There wasn't a lot of room for error.
The Day I Stopped Eating
We moved 10 times before I turned 7. My three siblings and I were homeschooled and had few friends because we moved so much. Also, no one wanted to be friends with the preacher's kids.
Dad was a minister who preached about a loving God from the pulpit, but I couldn't find a loving God. All I could find were a bunch of hard-fast rules: sit up straight, don't stare, don't interrupt, don't talk with your mouth full, don't swear, don't lie, don't cheat, don't have sex before marriage, and don't let anyone know that you might have doubts about anything. After all, saved people don't sin.
I couldn't help but ask myself: what do we need saving from if we never sin?
At some point, I stopped eating.
It happened one very ordinary day—winter of 1989. We were in England visiting my grandmother and I had the flu, and I liked how my cheeks grew flushed and thin when I couldn't hold food down. And I thought, maybe if I looked skinnier, people would see me.
So when I came home, I began to say no.
My Rebellious Refusal of Food
I said no to desserts. I said no to peanut butter and jam and margarine. Then I said no to bread itself. And the no felt good. It numbed the pain for just a minute, the pain of feeling like an oversight.
When I said no, the world listened. Mom still dished up the food on my plate, but she couldn't make me eat it.
I couldn't control where we lived, or how often we went to church, or whether or not Dad wanted to spend time with me, but I could control my eating. Soon though, my eating began to control me.
By the time I was 13 years old, I only weighed 60 pounds. My hair was falling out and my nails were cracking. We were on our way to the hospital when I realized I was dying.
My Angel in Running Shoes
Some say she was my angel.
I don't know who she was except for a beautiful woman who ran past the window of our mini-van with its floral curtains.
The woman jogging wasn't skinny, but she was the most beautiful person I'd ever seen. Her muscles were moving, her face was full of light, and I looked down at the bones in my knees. They knocked together. I was cold in spite of the summer. My skin was purple. And in that moment I knew what the nurses would soon confirm, I should have been dead.
I wanted to live, more than anything. More than being skinny. I was young, but I felt ancient.
I carried the hurts of a thousand years within my heart. The pain of a world that felt unseen by God. The pain of a people who smile at one another then turn and talk behind each other's backs. The pain of orphans and poverty. The pain of a congregation squealing out of the church parking lot in their sports cars. The pain of the man behind the pulpit who loved his children but didn't know how to show it.
I had been told since the age of five that I needed Jesus, but I was never given permission to. I wasn't sure how to need Him if I couldn't break the rules. So I did it quietly, politely.
Some kids cut. Others overeat, stuffing cookies and donuts in the crevices of their mattress. Still others do drugs or drink. But we're all the same in that we all wear invisible scars. Not the razor mark ones, but the ones on our hearts.
The food, the drinking, the cutting—it's just a distraction from what really hurts.
Starting Over ... and Over ... Again
The day my parents admitted me into the hospital, the nurses took one look at my hypothermic body and said I was a miracle. I thought again of the woman running outside my van window and I bowed my head and wept, realizing God was asking me to choose.
He wanted me to choose life.
My Heavenly Father loved me and had a plan for me. And I picked up a fork that day and began to eat. Yet it wasn't until I relapsed into anorexia as a young married woman, 10 years later, that I realized I needed more than food. I needed to revisit the past in order to find complete healing.
I needed to return to those wounded, aching places; the raw pulsing parts where the little girl in me was crying out. And I needed to invite my Savior into those moments. It wasn't enough just to pick up a fork.
Learning to Forgive Myself and My Family
As humans, we forgive, but we don't forget, and until we usher forgiveness into those childhood memories, we won't know what it means to be whole. To be born again. To become new.
So, following my three-year-relapse, my husband and I moved to South Korea to start over. I began to eat again, but also to explore those dark places in the photo albums, the ones that gave me a glimpse into the little girl who'd felt so alone that she'd tried to starve herself to death.
And I cried for her.
At that time, Mom got brain cancer and it was very difficult on her. One day while I was in Korea, my Dad called me and asked if I could watch Mom over webcam so he could go to a youth event. When I saw her through the camera, I cried, but this time for my Mom. She was dying, and alone, and I needed to go home and see her.
I became my mother's caregiver for the next three years. I worked alongside my father to love on her, and it was during this time that true forgiveness began to happen. I gained empathy for my parents and saw them as the children they used to be. We all were just repentant sinners trying to make our way to the cross.
And even as I healed, God planted a new kind of life within me.
Aiden Grey, My 8-Pound Gift of Grace
I wasn't supposed to be able to have children. The doctors told me when I was 13 that I probably couldn't have children due to the damage I'd done my body. Yet, after trying unsuccessfully for a year and a half, I conceived Aiden Grey—an 8-pound gift of grace.
Having a child opened my eyes to the frailty and strength of humanity, and the glory and mess of being a parent. I began to explore a love I'd never known before, a selfless kind of love, one that bent and broke for my child. And in this came a longing to fully know and be defined by God's love. I wanted to understand what it meant to be His daughter. I had been told all my life that God loved me. But I thought it was like human love. I thought it was conditional and exhaustible.
I have a counselor friend who took me, in my mind's eye, to a God who ran the long road to meet me, His robe flying, because He'd been waiting. She introduced me to the God of Zephaniah 3:17, a God who delights in us, who sings over us, who quiets us with His love. A God who embraces lepers, who dines at a tax collector's home, and who hangs out with prostitutes.
A God who gives up everything for a world that scorns Him. Because He is love.
And I realized: it had never been about whether or not God was loving. It had always been about whether or not I believed in grace—not just for others, but for myself.
Learning to See the World Through the Life of Christ
I was raised to view life through the glasses of missiology (how we live), which informs ecclesiology (how we do church), which then informs Christology (how we view the life of Jesus).
Instead of interpreting the world and church through the life of Christ—instead of starting with Christology—I'd been taught to view the church, and world, through my behavior. And my behavior was either wrong or right, and there was no middle ground, there was no grace, because I didn't start first with Christ.
It's not bad to have rules. In fact, it's good, and sin is something we battle from day one, and we need saving from it. We need to overcome it, to live in the fullness of the resurrection. We need sanctification, justification, and one day—glorification.
We Need Grace, the Sweetest Food
We need grace. Grace is not the end, but the beginning. Grace is the candle burning in the darkness. And if we teach our churches to view themselves, and the world, through the sacrifice of Christ versus through correct doctrine or perfect behavior, then there will be a lot less self-harm among our children.
So, I'm practicing grace slowly and tenderly, even as I grow a daughter in my womb. I'm learning to speak it to myself—by saying thank you to God for carrying me through the day.
Grace, friends. It's the sweetest food.
Because of Him, I'll never go hungry again.
Learn more about Emily Wierenga and her book Atlas Girl: Disillusioned and yearning for freedom, Emily Wierenga left home at age 18 with no intention of ever returning. Broken down by organized religion, a childhood battle with anorexia and her parents' rigidity, she set out to find God somewhere else—anywhere else. She had no idea that her faith was waiting for her the whole time--in the place she least expected it. Article courtesy of HomeLife magazine.