Victory over Our Cravings, One Mini-goal at a Time [Excerpt by Lysa TerKeurst]
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Do we have cravings, or do cravings have us? Here Lysa TerKeurst offers encouragement and tips for when beating our cravings feels like a pipe dream.
If you don’t have issues with food, I think you’ll be surprised at how relevant Made to Crave is for you, too. Lysa’s writing plumbs the heights and depths of our craving hearts. (Excerpt from Made to Crave Devotional: 60 Days to Craving God, Not Food.)
- Adam Forrest, Zondervan
From Made to Crave Devotional by Lysa TerKeurst
There are days I don’t feel victorious. Like the day when the upstairs toilet clogged and flooded my kitchen ceiling. Or the day I got stuck in traffic, yelled at my kids, and missed an important meeting. Those are the days when my long-term goals to get healthy don’t feel as important as my need for immediate comfort. I just want to blow my healthy eating plan out of frustration with something gooey, sweet, and cream laden.
I bet you’ve had something occur this week that doesn’t make you feel very victorious either. A sick child, a missed deadline, tension in a friendship, or a number on the scale that almost made you cry. I understand. But may I encourage you? Even in the midst of trying circumstances and bad days, you can be victorious.
You can be victorious even when the distance between your present reality and your desired goal seems so far apart.
How?
Set mini-goals. Losing twenty, fifty, one hundred pounds, or more can seem so far away. And faraway goals are hard to hang onto when life drains us and it feels like those French fries sure could fill us.
Set mini-goals physically by getting a strategy for making healthy choices. How can you prepare now to drink eight glasses of water today? What is a healthy snack option you’ll turn to when those afternoon salty and sugary cravings start calling? Are you going out to eat at a restaurant? Use the Internet to look up the nutritional information for their menu so you can make informed healthy choices. If hit with an unexpected temptation today, what healthy go-to script or Bible verse can you arm yourself with in advance to combat justifications and compromises?
Each mini-goal you accomplish today is a moment of victory.
[Spiritual Mini-Goals]
We can also set mini-goals spiritually. We will always be most victorious when we are in the center of God’s will. When we are in God’s will, we are able to see our trials from God’s perspective — through the lens of His grace and truth. But what is God’s will?
The apostle Paul wrote, “Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks … for this is God’s will” (1 Thessalonians 5:16–18). This is an explicit description of what God’s will is. To be in the center of God’s will is to be [someone] who is joyful, prayerful, and thankful.
