My Cardboard Testimony

On Friday, all us estudantes are heading out to either Huanaco or Iquitos. I am going to Iquitos. :) Iquitos is in the jungle. It should be great. We have some dramas planned, and we will be traveling around visiting some different places and sharing the gospel.
One of the things that we have been asked to do is share our testimony. Our team leader, Holly, thought it would be cool to do "Cardboard Testimonies". This is simply writing a short phrase that says who you were before Christ on one side of a piece of cardboard, and who you are now on the other side. It will of course be translated into Spanish before it goes onto the cardboard. But I have been thinking a lot about what I want to write on my cardboard. The truth is, there are different areas of my life that I surrendered quite awhile after coming to my realization of my need for a Savior at the ripe old age of 7 years old. ;) My testimony is not just the story of a little girl who was afraid of the dark and said a magic prayer. It is how God has worked in every area of my life to make me into the person He wants me to be, the person I am still striving to become through the Spirit.
There is a rather difficult part of my testimony that I find embarrassing, but that I feel God is preparing to use in the lives of others. This is something I thought I would share with you, my faithful blog readers. Those who are either amused by me, or who love me enough to look past my insanity to what God is doing in this silly gringa.
I am a Type-A, over-competitive, controlling perfectionist. I like to be first, number one, the best, and in charge. I used to hate doing anything if I wasn't great at it. I lost friends because they beat me at my favorite games in elementary school.
When I was in High School, I realized that there are a lot of things I can't control. I realized I can't possibly be the best at everything all the time. And this upset me. It turned my little world upside down. So, I decided to find something I could control.
I struggled with eating problems for a couple years. I never completely stopped eating, but I used food as a punishment/reward system for life. When things went "good enough", I could quench that hunger with a sandwich or an ice cream. When things were going bad, I could stop eating lunch, or maybe not eat for three or four days. It was systematic, it was methodical. I wanted to feel the pains of hunger. That's what drove me to work harder. That was my reminder that I hadn't met my goal, that I hadn't succeeded yet in the task at hand.
But all along, I knew, that this was a sin. This was me trying to take charge of my own life, me trying to control everything. I wasn't trusting God to take care of me. I was trusting me, my system. And what does that say about the God I serve? That He's not big enough! That He can't take care of me without my help. I was thinking I was somehow capable of meeting godly standards.
When I realized just how big my God is, and how much He loves me and cares for me, despite my inability to ever be good enough, I realized how much it saddened His heart that I could not trust Him. The Bible says that God created the heavens and the earth (Gen. 1:1). It tells us that He knew me as I formed in my mother's womb (Ps. 139). It says that He has my life already planned out so that I don't have to worry about how to serve Him (Eph. 2:10).
Nothing I do will ever be "good enough" for God because only God is good. He can only accept perfection, but through His Son, I am made perfect in His sight. So, He never expects perfection from me unless He has brought it about. I can rest that in the eyes of my great God, I stand not just "good enough", but "perfect" because of the blood of His perfect Son.
I am still competitive, and I still like things to follow a system and an order, but God has brought such balance to my life, and the struggle with this area is almost non-existent. (I say "almost" because sometimes the urge to stop eating hits me like a brick, I cannot go on a diet, and fasting is very hard for me.) And when that temptation does come, I just ask myself, "How big is your God?"
So, I guess my cardboard can say, "Perfectionist who does not eat," and on the other side, "Trusting God, partaking of the Bread of Life."