Cause and Effect

Alright.  I'm not what you would consider obese, but I have some pounds that would look much better off of my body.  Over the summer I joined Weight Watchers and was successful in losing 10 pounds fairly quickly.  I was in the groove and loving the results.  Then we moved.  For some reason it seemed like the only food in the house for an entire week was bagels and pizza.  It didn't take me long at all to fall right back into my bad habits and extra slices of pizza.  The move was stressful, unpacking was stressful and getting the family settled was stressful.  What calms stress more than ice cream?  Since I'd already blown my good habits out of the water I indulged.  To be honest I indulged over and over again.  Before I knew it I was right back to where I started on the scale.  My clothes don't fit anymore and I'm once again uncomfortable in my skin and my back is starting to hurt.  


This week I started getting back on track again.  I miraculously remembered where the gym was and actually went inside.  I hopped onto an elliptical machine and started huffing and puffing away.  I watched as the numbers of calories burned slowly went up....3......4.......5.  I had some good music on so I listened to some songs and was starting to sweat and was feeling good about my first workout in WAY too long.  After a while I look at the calories burned certain to be impressed with the number.  134 calories burned.  WHAT?  134 calories is one good scoop of Ben & Jerry's peanut butter cup ice cream with a chunk of chocolate!!!!  I confess.  I can down a pint.  I don't even want to know how long I'd have to be on that machine to burn off a pint of ice cream, but I'm certain I would be closing down the place.  Why is it that it is SO easy to eat the calories but it takes so much effort and time and pain to get them back off?  That ice cream tastes so good for how long?  Not long enough in comparison to what it takes to undo what you did.  


All this made me think back on some of the mistakes I've made in my past.  Mistakes that I so wish could have been erased with some time on a treadmill.  I've made a lot of mistakes that were more serious than a few extra Oreos.  We've all made mistakes.  How many mistakes have we made that seemed so insignificant at the time.  A secret we share when we were trusted to keep it.  A few sentences blurted out in a matter of seconds can result in months or even years of trying to gain back the trust of a friend.  We get angry and say things out of the heat of the moment and can spend an incredible amount of time trying to reestablish our character to others.   Seemingly innocent flirting can take one down a slippery slope to an affair and the results are devastating.  Marriages are destroyed every day because of unfaithfulness and the ones that survive are altered to say the least with years and years of building back trust.   Young girls make a poor decision to give themselves away too soon and suffer the heartbreak of the loss of innocence, or in too many cases then have to face a pregnancy much sooner than expected.     


God asks us to follow His rules not for the sake of having rules.  Yes, we are called to be Holy.  We are called to follow the example of Jesus although we will always fall short.  God asks us to do and not do things for our own good.  He wants to keep us from the pain.   Look at the ten commandments.  Do not commit adultery.  Why?  God wants our marriages to be pure.  Unfaithfulness causes way too much pain to way too many people.   You can go down the list of the commandments and all of them are to make us the best we can be.  Going down the wrong road leads to pain, and it's not because God is beating us down for making the wrong decisions, it's because there's this little things called cause and effect.  We reap what we sow.  It's a pretty easy concept.  So many of the difficult things we go through are because of our own actions.  Certainly that is not always true, tragedies occur and sometimes there truly is no rhyme or reason.  


I'm thankful that at this exact moment in my life I'm experiencing the discomfort of extra pounds that are a result of my own poor choices in my diet.  I can easily change that.  It doesn't mean that any pounds will come off easily, but the remedy is simple, though execution may be a challenge.  I'm sure there will be more moments in my life when I'm paying the price for a decision that should have been thought through a little more.  I'm praying, however, that I have learned enough from my past mistakes to steer clear of them in the future.  I'm hoping the same for you.