by Scott Davis
My wife and I dated for years before marrying in our mid-30s. When we dated, I drove wherever we went and she sat in the passenger seat. We never had any problems with the arrangement. Now that we’ve been married a while, it’s different.
The transformation started so slowly that at first I thought something was wrong with my car. I figured all the squeaking came from my worn engine belts. I’d hear, “Oooh, ooh, woooh, woooh, woooh.” It sounded like a monkey.
The noise grew louder until I finally noticed Donna holding up her hands in front of the windshield, eyes wide open.
“What is wrong with you?” I asked.
She couldn’t hold it any longer. She yelled a new warning every few moments: “Look out! Red light! Watch it! Look out for that car! You’re too close to their bumper! Slow down!”
“What are you doing?” I yelled. “You’re going to make me wreck!”
She didn’t stop. At every curve or traffic light, Donna squeaked or yelled and stomped on her imaginary break pedal to no avail. She had no control of the car. I was the one at the wheel, no matter how much she sounded like a chimp.
When we reached the interstate, she complained I manipulated the accelerator too much, up and down, up and down, rocking her back and forth.
I shook my head. “It’s on cruise control, for goodness sake.”
Before long, she whined about feeling queasy: “Oh, you’re making me car sick. Turn on the air. Please turn on the airrrrrrrrr” and buried her face in the air conditioner vent. Then she rolled down her window and hung her head out like a dog, tongue flapping in the wind.
Now if you come to our small town and see us in the car, Donna is at the wheel and I’m in the passenger seat mumbling and looking like a dork.
Our driving escapades mirror the Christian life. When we say, “Jesus, save me and come into my life,” the Holy Spirit comes into our lives but we still are wrapped in flesh. We’re not going to be perfect until we get to heaven. So we’re going to face the same temptations we’ve always faced. We now have the power not to cave in to those temptations, but we’re always going to hear the devil barking in our ears.
Not that I’m calling my wife the devil, but you know what I’m saying.
The more we allow the Holy Spirit to drive our lives, Satan can chirp all he wants but he doesn’t have control anymore.
Paul makes another strong point in Philippians 3:19. He refers to the enemies of Christ “whose end is destruction, whose god is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame—who set their mind on earthly things.”
When I struggled with my weight, I knew I was fat but my mind was so set on earthly things that I actually thought, “I’m not that fat, I’m still good looking.” Addiction warps perception. But then I would see my photos and reality would set in again.
I was never more like the enemies of Christ, like a heathen, than when my appetites drove me and my god was my belly. I could’ve painted it gold and let people bow down to the Buddha.
Swallowing the truth means ignoring the obvious. It means allowing addiction to warp perception. Admitting the truth means accepting who’s in charge.
Sid Bream is a friend of mine from college. He played first base for the Pittsburgh Pirates and Atlanta Braves and became famous for sliding safely into home to win the 1992 National League Championship Series and send the Braves to the World Series.
If Sid ever decided to take a break in the middle of a game and laid his mitt on first base and walked into the dugout, any ball hit to the right side of the infield would go directly to right field. Any ball hit anywhere else in the infield couldn’t be thrown to first base for the out.
Sid actually had to place his hand in the mitt for it to function properly and for the game to flow correctly. He couldn’t just place a thumb in the mitt and have it flop around on the end of his arm. Rather, he had to fill up that mitt with his hand to make it work right. The same is true with the Holy Spirit’s work in our lives. We have to allow Him to fill us and control every single aspect of our existence.
This is why Paul, after describing the enemies of Christ whose god is their belly, describes those precious ones who belong to Jesus. Meditate on this beauty:
“But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ who, by the power that enables Him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body” (Philippians 3:20-21, NIV, emphasis mine).
My lowly body will be like His glorious body. Thank the Lord…
Same with me when it comes to food.
THE TWO PARAMEDICS STOPPED in their tracks when they got a load of me. I lay moaning on the couch in my living room. I wasn’t married yet and lived on the family farm with my mother. To this day, I live in the same house I grew up in. At any moment I can walk into a room and smack dab into a flood of memories.
My bad back had flared up. It was about 1995 and I weighed about 280 pounds. I fluctuated among several different weights through the years. The pendulum swung from relatively healthy, as when I met Donna, to pleasantly plump and sometimes all the way to gross.
When I lay on the couch in severe back pain, I was stuck on gross.
I was in the middle of a tour and had to cancel all of my concerts for two months. My poor mother didn’t know what to do. One day, the pain intensified and I couldn’t budge an inch. We had to call 911. Due to my size and the pain, I called paramedics to the rescue.
The embarrassing part was that they didn’t come to take me to the emergency room. They came to take me to a doctor’s appointment. I couldn’t make it to my family doctor any other way.
Thankfully, the ambulance didn’t blare its sirens as it rumbled into my yard. They knew it was a non-emergency emergency. I heard the baritone of the engine and the swish of the air brakes as the burly paramedics scrambled to gather their effects and make their way inside.
When they walked in the door, my vision of “burly” vanished.
The paramedics were women. Little women.
The ladies walked in and stopped in their tracks when they saw this massive beached whale with a locked-up back and full bladder.
“Oh my,” one of them said before she knew it. The other paramedic leaned toward her partner and whispered without turning her face.
“We might need some backup.”
I wanted to crawl under a cushion. I’ve heard of police needing backup, but paramedics?
My dainty helpers dispensed with the required blood pressure and heart rate checks, asked me a few questions, and radioed the situation back to headquarters. They didn’t exactly have a walkie-talkie code for “lard-butt needs a lift,” so they just said it—in a professional manner, of course.
“Um, yes, um, we’re on location. Subject is incapacitated and is more than we can handle.”
The radio squawked. “What’s the problem?”
“We need more manpower, sir.”
“More manpower? What do you mean?”
“Sir, we need assistance to lift him. He’s a large individual.”
“Can he not shift onto the gurney?”
“No, sir. He can’t move on his own. Terrible back pain. We gotta have some muscle here.”
Pause.
“Listen, we’re, uh, we’re—are you sure you can’t move him?”
She was nodding before she pressed the button. “Positive.”
Pause.
“10-4. Assistance on the way.”
Right about then I would’ve signed Dr. Kevorkian’s release if he wanted to help send me on to Jesus.
The wait seemed interminable before a fire truck full of men—burly men—wailed into the driveway. I guess they blared the siren because indeed no code existed for my predicament and for them it qualified as an emergency call. I was as red as their truck.
A few minutes later, they lifted and pushed the gurney into the ambulance, its legs folding underneath and jolting more pain throughout my
back. It may have been the quickest completion of any assignment in Henry County Fire Department history.
The ambulance jostled toward the doctor’s office, siren silent. The driver stopped at traffic lights and stop signs. It was a slow ride, an expensive but necessary lift into town.
Imagine that. I needed the dadgum fire department to lift me into an ambulance, and I needed a dadgum ambulance for a doctor’s visit.
I’ve seen cable documentaries about morbidly obese people who couldn’t move and whose rescuers tore down walls so forklifts could pick up the patients on their beds. I never envisioned I’d need a group of civil servants to help me make a doctor’s visit.
Dr. Blissett had been my family doctor since I was kid. Every time he saw me in my adult years he told me to lose weight. He never failed to scold me. When we arrived at his office, the ambulance sat idling. Several moments passed. I didn’t know what was going on and began to wonder whether Dr. Blissett was in the office. The paramedics didn’t even bother trying to get me out of the ambulance because they knew they couldn’t lift me back in.
Suddenly, the back doors swung open. There he stood, scowling at me.
“I told you!” he yelled. “This is ridiculous.”
I don’t think he said another word. He gave me some kind of painkiller on the spot so I could at least function and get to the bathroom. He whipped out his prescription pad and scribbled.
“Here,” he said, snatching a sheet off the pad. “But you have to lose weight.”
And he slammed the door.
Andy’s Advice
Even the ambulance ride wasn’t a wakeup call. My back eventually improved, but my physique and outlook didn’t. Though I recognized I had a problem, though I admitted my addiction, though I was embarrassed by it, I still plowed into the buffet line.
The reason? For years I practiced one of the most prevalent Golden Nuggets: Enjoy the Freedom Fries.
That means I took liberty to eat anything I pleased and refused to accept responsibility for my actions. It’s one thing to admit a problem, but it’s quite another to own it.
I had to take personal responsibility for my habits by not passing the buck. It wasn’t a glandular problem, it wasn’t my grandmother’s fault, and I wasn’t gravitationally challenged. I didn’t have a fat gene. I had a fat piece of bacon in my mouth.
If you want to stay fat or get even fatter, enjoy the freedom fries. They’re crisp and salty and are crazy good with a cookies-and-cream milkshake, but in the end they clog up your heart in more ways than one. They block out common sense and offer a deceptive escape to only one kind of freedom, the freedom to choose to remain in a gut rut. They also block out communication with God. When you eat like I did, it’s sin, and sin stymies communication with God. It’s hard to hear a still small voice when you’re scraping your plate.
I’m not a medical doctor or a scientist, but I know everyone is different and faces different challenges. I also know most people are experts at making excuses and passing the buck.
In my case, I’d pass the buck and ask somebody to pass the mac-and-cheese.
I didn’t see my weight as my responsibility. How could it be my responsibility since I was born this way? Since my mama made me clean my plate? Since I have a problem with metabolism? Since my daddy was fat too? It wasn’t my fault, and since it wasn’t my fault…hey, are those brownies over there?
The devil didn’t make me reach for that appetizer either. I had to admit to myself I had a choice, and I learned a person chooses to eat to become what he is.
The movie Shawshank Redemption features several poignant moments, none more full of gravity than when lead characters Andy Dufresne and “Red” Redding sit in the prison courtyard with their backs against the cold block walls late in the movie. A resolute Andy has just emerged from a long turn in solitary confinement, and he does little more than stare and speak monotone through one last conversation with his buddy before escaping Shawshank prison. Red knows something is wrong. He protests Andy’s desperate talk but can only listen as Andy spits out a line that still resonates with me.
“Comes down to a simple choice, really,” Andy says. “Get busy livin’ or get busy dyin’.”
Every overweight person needs a Shawshank moment. We need to realize the sobering truth that every day we either get busy living or get busy dying. Our choices make or break us. People make time to do what they really want to do. If we really want to lose weight or eat healthy foods, we’ll do it. When I really wanted to eat, I ate. Many nights, I lay on the couch until Donna fell asleep in the bedroom because I knew I could sneak out to eat and she wouldn’t know it. Some people sneak out at night to see someone else. I snuck out to see burgers. I had a fling with the Dairy Queen.
I sacrificed sleep or work—and risked the possibility of a traffic ticket—to binge. Drive-thrus are open late, but some of my favorites close at 1 a.m. Sometimes I had to wait on Donna to fall asleep so I could race to the restaurant before it closed. Johnny Law likes to cruise around at that hour looking either for drunks or addicts trying to score drugs. I was an addict, but by the time the cops got to me I’d have grease dripping off my chin.
I wasn’t always big, so for me that was another strike against the “genealogical predisposition” excuse. Some people are big their entire lives. In elementary school I was thin. I have pictures of myself as a child when I looked almost gaunt. I grew bigger in junior high and high school, affecting everything, especially in high school. I enjoyed playing football and I was good at it because I could knock people backward off of the line of scrimmage, but I wasn’t the good-looking football star. I was the kid whose mom bought his pants in the Husky section. That was one of my original embarrassing episodes.
When I reached college, I went for the hunk look. At least I tried.
I dated the same girl for three-and-a-half years at Liberty. One time she broke up with me, and I didn’t say a word to anybody except my roommates. I fasted and prayed for five days. I didn’t see her and didn’t stalk her like I wanted. I stayed away. A week later she saw me after chapel and said, “Hey, whatcha doin’?” Wink, wink.
We got back together. But during that period, I worked like mad in the YMCA weight room, where I did bench presses, squats, situps, curls, shoulder presses, dead lifts, and various other torture techniques. I almost passed out as I lifted weights during my fast, but I stayed in shape.
One day I stepped on a set of scales and weighed 159. That stuck in my mind because I hit that weight only one time. I stayed in the 160s during that busy time period, but my average weight during college was 175. Then when I got out of college my weight started moving up to the 190s and higher.
All of which goes to prove my point.
I believe 99.9 percent of people can lose weight without surgery or pills or gimmicks—if they want to. I believe the Bible when it says these desperate cravings come from within. I also believe all of us have unique circumstances we face that can make the road to health easier or more difficult. Call it environment or upbringing, but it’s another substantial factor in the equation.
Notice I didn’t call it an excuse. I called it a factor. It’s a reality, nonetheless, one that I know better than anyone because of the first time I saw an ambulance parked in the driveway of my farm home….
Ho Cakes and Frog Legs
Liberty College used a brilliant stroke of marketing during my senior year of high school. It sent a performance group to my school.
While their intentions were to evangelize, the performers left an incredible impression upon my young heart. One of their songs, “Love Them While You Can,” became part of my own show years later. I remember one of the lead singers introducing the song by saying, “You need to go home tonight and tell your mom and dad you love them.”
Charles Davis was larger than life in ways innumerable. He reached 280 pounds at his heaviest, a man’s man with a barrel chest and a laugh that echoed. It never felt cool to go up to my 280-pound dad
and put my arm around him and say, “Dad, I love you.” So I never did. He was big into sports, especially football, which he made me play. In fact, he made me play every sport. I was pretty good at football. I wasn’t good at basketball, but I played it. I was so bad that they created a new position for me on the basketball team: tailback. The coach looked at me and said, “Get your tail back on the bench.”
Whatever the sport, my dad attended every game.
It was a Wednesday when the group from Liberty urged us to go home and tell our parents we loved them. I remember I went home and purposed in my heart to tell my dad I loved him. I don’t know why, but I just…couldn’t. I still don’t know why.
The very next day, I was called to the school office. My brother waited on the other end of the phone line.
“You need to come home,” he said. “Dad is not well.” When I made it home, a fire truck and an ambulance sat in the driveway.
My dad died later that day.
I will always regret that I never took the opportunity to say, “I love you.” He was fifty-seven years old when he died, and now that I’m forty-eight I realize how young he died. Doctors told us he had blood clots in his lungs, and every time he stood to his feet the blood clots moved. One eventually reached his heart and killed him. He had suffered from phlebitis, an inflammation of a vein that leads to blood clots, and wore a leg brace for some time.
My mother knew I loved her because I told her all the time. We didn’t get along perfectly though. I learned to bicker by watching my parents, who fought just like other parents. Our frying pan was on a frequent flier program when I was kid. But I’m glad I told my mother I loved her because she died in my home in 2001.
Both of my parents were big people. Yet I’m convinced both could’ve lost weight if they wished. We just weren’t conditioned to think that way. I grew up in an era when health wasn’t on the forefront of society’s consciousness. Instead, almost every meal was an event, and my mom excelled at it.