24th- 31st December 2017
I can’t believe that this is my last post this year. This year has seemed to have gone so quickly and the last 2 years since I started this journey has just flown by.
The Christmas period has been quite hard for me – there has been so much food around that hasn’t helped but it has been a great time for me to relax and meet up with a lot of family and friends.
One thing I did that I have never done before is make a gingerbread house. I have always wanted to do it and I thought because I am a creative person I thought I might be quite good at it .
I had a picture in my head of how I wanted my gingerbread house to look.
However, in reality my gingerbread house looked so much different to that. I bought a pack and I thought I would start there. I naively thought that the gingerbread was in there and I just had to make into the house, but no. I physically had to make the mixture and bake it too.
Once it had cooled then came the part of making it look like a house. It was a lot harder than I thought. I ended up with it falling down a few times, the icing ran all over the place. By the time we had finished I think it looked more like a rickety old shack rather than a grand house that I imagined.
I would have shown a photo but it was far too embarrassing to even take a picture of. My boys thought that the only thing it was good for was destroying which they took great pleasure in doing!
This scenario totally sums up my year. When I started the year I had very high expectations I was going to lose so much more weight and reach my goal by now but in reality the total opposite has happened. I haven’t lost any weight at all in fact it has gone up a little.
Last year I lost 5 and a half stone – this year I have lost nothing. It has also made me think what a waste – it made me think that I have totally wasted my year.
But if I think back on my year I have realised that I haven’t wasted it at all. Ok, so I haven’t lost any weight, but I have kept up with my healthy eating most of the time, I have managed to keep doing my exercise, I haven’t gone back into that state of feeling worthless, my confidence has grown, I can still do so much more than I ever could before.
I have been able to think of others rather than myself which has entailed me going on 2 mission trips – one to Serbia with some women and the other to Rwanda where I even managed to do something that I would never have ever dreamed.
Running that half marathon was such a huge achievement for me. I can’t believe I actually did it – it’s my greatest achievement to date. So that’s why I don’t think I wasted my year.
As I now step into 2018 and start my 3rd year of this journey I have that image of my perfect gingerbread house again but to get it that way will take a lot of hard work, determination, and overcoming things that I can’t foresee.
A bible verse was given at church today. It’s in Philippians 3 verse 13-14:
“Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: forgetting what is behind and straining towards what is ahead. I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me to.”
That’s what I am going to go by this year.
Happy new year. Have a great 2018
