There’s no waiting ’til after the holidays for me, I just decided. My big diet begins NOW! I can’t even fit into my “fat” winter coat, which I just learned the other day when the temps first dipped below 30. Worse yet, I only have one pair of jeans that fit and that’s only because I just purchased them a month ago to fit my ever-growing belly poundage.

I’ve been trying to prepare myself mentally for when I arrive home in Akron, Ohio this coming Monday and my mom gets her first look at fatty me since last May, when I was 20 pounds lighter and still overweight. I can just hear her now: “Oh, Lisa, how could you?! What are you thinking?!”

The worst of it, though, will come from step-father (a retired prosecuting attorney) who always devotes a portion of our holiday-time together to giving me a “shot in the arm” by detailing how I’m shamelessly squandering my talents, education, money, God-given good looks, on and on.

Well, I’ve got to say he is always motivational, even if I still haven’t gotten my act together from his dozen-plus years of cross-examining. My self-estimation of things is no more kind than his appraisal, either.

My dad (who earned a large clientele across northeastern Ohio as a diet doc in the ’70s) taught all his kids from an early age that overeating—and deliberately eating unhealthily—is as much a sin as drinking, smoking, popping pills, mainlining caffeine and sugar, etc. I just never thought I was going to be someone who’d one day face a weight problem.

*****

Along these lines, here’s a great outtake from a sermon by Jordan:

“There’s something you have to understand about what godliness is. We have lists of taboos where we say, ‘Well, I don’t do this and I don’t do that.’ Therefore you’re godly. The problem with our list of taboos is that everybody has their own list.

“It’s like the old preacher Down South who was preaching against liquor one Sunday morning. He was preaching away and this little old lady back in the back yelled out, ‘Amen, preacher, you tell ’em! Preach it!’

“Then he got to preaching about smoking. She shouted, ‘That’s right, preacher! C’mon, tell it!’ He got to preaching about adultery and she just kept ‘Amen-ing’ him.

“Then he got to preaching about dipping snuff and she didn’t say anything. She got real quiet and when she went to go out the door after the service, he asked her, ‘Sister, you were coming along there with me for awhile, then you quit. What happened?’ She said, ‘Well, you got to plowing in my tater patch.’

“That’s the way we are. It’s human nature; it’s normal. We all have blind spots, but what religion does is it sets up these external standards of expectation and requirements. The dos and the don’ts, and it says if you do these and you don’t do that, and you conform to my legalistic standards—my standard of expectations for you—then you’ll have arrived at being like God.

“Because certainly, ‘God wouldn’t disagree with me about what the standards ought to be,’ and so you have all kind of (justifications). Some of you are like me, you’ve come out from under that tyranny and that bondage, and you say, ‘Hallelujah for liberty in Christ Jesus!’ ”

*****

Here’s another great passage from Jordan: “I can remember when I was in college back in the late ’60s and we used to sit around in the snack shop (at the Southern Baptist-run Mobile College) and have these long, wonderfully nebulous, convoluted discussions about what is true spirituality.

“I always enjoyed the young preachers who would say, ‘Ga-awwd would have me to do . . . ’ They had this little tone in their voice because they thought that was spirituality. You know how it goes. And we used to talk about, ‘Well, how do you do it and what is it?’

“Of course, the answer all along was in I Corinthian 14:37: ‘If any man think himself to be a prophet, or spiritual, let him acknowledge that the things that I write unto you are the commandments of the Lord.’

“The question is, ‘Is this your attitude about yourself; that you’re a prophet or a spiritual?’ This verse is going to read your meter here. Here’s an objective standard in the Word of God to identify what true spirituality is. You don’t have to worry about what Francis Schaeffer said about it, or doctor so-and-so.

“My friend, true spirituality in the dispensation of grace is determined by what you do with Paul’s message. And when you look around you at the church today, and you see the Body of Christ at-large and you see the total disregard for Paul’s message—and an attitude of carelessness toward it—then you have an answer as to why the church lies in the lap of irrelevance.

“Even the evangelical fundamental church is totally irrelevant to everybody except itself and it’s only relevant to itself as long as it can keep itself perpetuating itself.

“The world about us looks at the church with total disregard. It has no impact on the world today except when it gets in the political realm and tries to stir up political fervor.

“Whether it’s the liberal or fundamental church, that’s the only clout they have anymore. It’s who do they know politically. Why is that? Why have the mighty fallen? Because the truth has fallen in the streets and the test of what real spirituality is has failed.”