Good Morning God, Thank you for another day.

Heavenly Father, you have prodded me over the years to begin keeping a journal. Off and on I have and it has helped to track our progress in changing my life. You have consistently led me in directions I never felt possible and together we have walked a path that has always been the right one for me. Today I begin my journey "live" for everyone to read and see. May this journey of ours reach those people that you know are out there searching for you. May I be honest in every circumstance. How I am feeling, my decisions to listen or ignore. All of it. Let this be an open book into the year that I put all my faith in you. The year that I let go and Let God. While I give you all of it Lord, now that we have accomplished the first task: My Sobriety, I feel that you are leading me to focus this year on the remaining two priorities: My health and well-being and my financial situation. That requires some embarrassing statistics so that we can begin to track our progress. You know it all, but I know that it needs to be my starting point.

I am what doctors call morbidly obese. Not a very kind word, in fact a hurtful word that seems to make me feel so sad. I have had gastric bypass surgery which helped me to lose 140 pounds of which I have maintained loss of. I have been unable to lose more because of the excessive drinking, and because of lack of exercise, and poor eating habits. Today I weigh 326 pounds. I have a hard time getting my self up out of a chair. My back and knees are always in excruciating pain, and it is difficult to do much around the house. I rely on my husband a great deal of the time to do the things I can no longer do because of the energy it takes for me to just get around the house.

My finances...UGH! I seem heck bent on destroying anything good in my life. I have terrible, horrendous credit. I spend every dollar I take in, and barely remember to pay my bills until the past due notice is on and functioning loud and clear. I don't have much credit debit because I can't get a credit card, which I feel is a good thing, but still as I get older, I think its important that I can take care of and support myself. My husband and I have no children, we both hold decent jobs, so the ability to save should be an easy one. But its not. I think I have replaced drinking with spending. Trying to feed some hunger within myself.

I have over the years struggled with depression and probably tried every medication known to man to treat it. I have been at one time diagnosed with low level bi-polar disorder. Lord, you encouraged me to get off all the medications and rely strictly on you. While I don't think this is the message you would offer to others, I think you asked me to do it, because I was relying too much on my excuses and not enough on you. I have not been on medications for a year and sometimes the depression is still there and I find myself struggling to work through it, when in the past I would drink or medicate it away. You have been my lifeline through it all. I think medication is vital to the healing of depression, but for me it wasn't working and I needed to start from the beginning with you Lord, a clean slate so we could learn exactly what was going on. I relied on a very strong support group to gauge my emotions, my mood swings and advise me to get help if they saw the need.

I do not have a savings, our house is in what I call a "hovel" and terrible disrepair and negligence. We have been up before our Association Board with so many external repairs and slowly have been making progress on those items that we would eventually be fined for not addressing. The inside has suffered the most, and it is on most days an extremely overwhelming task. All that needs to be done in my mind is almost impossible. We had a pipe break in our house several years ago and from that we made the choice to spend the insurance money to catch up on bills and work on our house on our own. The money was spent, we are back where we started and we have progressively given up on the house because the task seemed unachievable. There is not one room in the house that I would call livable enough to have guests over but, we did decide to tackle one room at a time, and two rooms, a small reading room and the living room are close to being completed.


Our taxes have been ignored. And just recently I took out a withdrawal my 401k to get my house out of foreclosure. Humiliating statistics Lord but I am putting my faith in you. Giving it all. Exposing it all. May this give other people hope.